The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief 9781501743993

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Part One. Disbelief and Untruth
Chapter 1. Literature and Incredulity
Chapter 2. A Taxonomy of Untruth
Chapter 3. The Imitation of Language: Logomimesis in David Gerrold and Thomas Mann
Part Two. The Lethetic Genre
Chapter 4. The Rhetoric of Unreality: Aristophanes' Birds
Chapter 5. Incredible Joinings: Syllepsis in Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Nye
Chapter 6. Incredible Sunderings: Dialepsis in Christian Morgenstern, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar Allan Poe
Part Three. The Lethetic Mode
Chapter 7. The Oblivious Reader: Lucian and Edgar Allan Poe
Chapter 8. The Text as Propulsive Charge: Italo Calvino
Part Four. The Origins of Alethetic Reading
Chapter 9. Reading as Possession: Influence and Inspiration
Chapter 10. Plato and the Sacralization of Fiction
Part Five. Conclusion
Chapter 11. The Place of Lethetic Reading
Index

Citation preview

The Incredulous Reader

Also by Clayton Koelb Thomas

Manns

“ Goethe

and

Tolstoy

” .*

Notes and Sources

The Incredulous Reader LITERATURE AND

THE FUNCTION OF DISBELIEF

CLAYTON KOELB

Cornell University Press ITHACA

ANI)

LONDON

Copyright

©

1984 by Cornell University Press

All rights reserved.

thereof,

Except for brief quotations

must not be reproduced

in

in a review, this

book, or par

any form without permission

from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

in writing

Press, 124

published 1984 by Cornell University Press. Published in the United Kingdom by Cornell University Press, Ltd., London. first

International Standard

Book Number 0-8014-1645-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card

Number 83-18840

Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information

appears on the

I hi

paper

last

page of

in this book

is

the book.

acid-free

and

meets the guidelines

for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

To Susan il

libro, e chi lo scrisse.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2017 with funding from

Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/incredulousreadeOOkoel

Contents

Preface

9

Part One 1

2

3

Part 4

Disbelief and

/

Untruth

and Incredulity A Taxonomy of Untruth The Imitation of Language: Logomimesis David Gerrold and Thomas Mann Literature

Two The /

l

lie

15

28 in

41

Lethetic Genre

Rhetoric of Unreality:

Aristophanes’ Birds 5

61

Incredible Joinings: Syllepsis in Lewis Carroll,

Oscar Wilde, and Robert Nye 6

81

Incredible Sunderings: Dialepsis in Christian Morgenstern, Nicolai Gogol,

and Edgar Allan Poe

1

1

1

Part Three / The Lethetic Mode 7 The Oblivious Reader: Lucian and 8

Edgar Allan Poe he Text as Propulsive Charge:

143

Italo Cal vino

158

I

Part Four 9

/

The Origins of Alethetic Reading

Reading as Possession: Influence and Inspiration

177

Contents 10

Plato

and the Sacralization

of Fiction

Part Five / Conclusion The Place of Lethetic Reading 1

1

Index

Preface

This book began with a question that I considered simple, not to say naive: What happens when we read things that we do not and perhaps could not believe? was not very much I

concerned with the

relatively well-plowed field

of allegorical fantasy, that is, with hermeneutic strategies for discovering what might be “true” about these tall tales. The problem seemed to

me

our best allegorical efforts were tried, there remained a body of works that presented an incredible surface and stubbornly resisted all attempts to make them believable. Works such as Aristophanes’ Birds, Poe’s tales of terror, and the nonsense verses of Carroll and Morgenstern, along with a great deal of more contemporary “fantasy and science fiction,” still seem incredible no matter how criticism tries to interpret them. But if they do so, if there are such absolutely unbelievable fictions, how and why do we read them? How does our disbelief that, after all

reading process? I I bis issue, which at first regarded as simple, proves to be very difficult, complicated by its intimate connection with many problems of literary theory and the philosophy of language. It is

affect the

because our tradition has made special efforts to eliminate the problem by converting disbelief in the surface of texts to belief in their inner truth. Another complication is that the question of disbelief appears to be at once very old-fashioned and aggressively modern. Phrases such as “how all

the

more

difficult

does the drama move

if

it

is

not credited?” and “the willing

Preface suspension of disbelief' belong to the bedrock of our critical tradition. I heir very familiarity might lead some of us to think that the problem had been solved long since. At the same time, the question has a number of implications that are closely tied to issues of critical theory associated with structuralist and poststructuralist thought, with the work of Barthes and Derrida.

The danger on this side is that some readers may suspect that the problem is merely an artifact of a special theoretical orthodoxy, that indeed it would disappear if the deconstructionists (or

whoever) stopped grinding their double axes. One of my chief efforts has been to convince the reader that neither of these assumptions is warranted.

The

book’s subject, then, is a particular problem of reading. It will quickly become evident that reading, too, is in the main its method. My text proceeds, for the most part, by examining other texts that reveal something about the problem of

My

disbelief.

criteria for selecting the texts

I read were, first, that they contribute to the understanding of this problem and, a distant second, that I be able to read them in the languages in which they had been written. The texts I have chosen thus come from widely separated places and times and from authors of differing renown. Some readers may find it puzzling that I take

Robert

Nye

as “seriously’’ as Aristophanes, that I read David Gerrold as carefully as Thomas Mann. I can only reply that I have done so not to promote authors I happen to like, but to satisfy the demands imposed by the topic.

In order to spare the reader some of the discomforts of dealing with texts in many languages, I have provided translations of all material quoted from foreign language sources. In almost all cases the original is given, in whole or in part, either in the notes or in the text beside the translation; a few quotations appear in English only, on the assumption that the reader is unlikely to want to consult the originals when they are not central to the

argument.

try to use

standard translations when available, but often, for various reasons, have felt the need to provide my own. I ranslations other than mine are always acknowledged in I

I

the notes. In the case of materials in ancient Greek, I have given originals in transliteration (not phonemic transcription), and

have

made no attempt /

10

to represent quantity.

Preface

My book

has

its

distant origins in the 1950s,

when

I

started

works of Robert Heinlein and developed what became a lifelong fascination with science fiction and fantasy. More immediately, the impulse to write this volume and not another came from the encouragement and support of Susan Noakes, whose combination of theoretical sophistication and inreading

t

lie

my deepest critical concerns made her advice always compelling. Anne Burnett, Sun Hee Kim Gertz, Samuel Jaffe, sight into

George Walsh, and Anthony Yu read parts of the manuscript as it progressed and gave me the benefit of their learning and experience. have not taken as

James Redfield, Monica

Setterwall,

I

advantage of their advice as I should have, I am sure. Eli Rosenow will recognize elements in this book as products of conversations long past, as will Betsy Dawson and Richard Weisberg. also acknowledge the valuable assistance I received from Linda Brodkey and Donald G. Marshall. Both read the manuscript with great care and sympathy, and both offered suggestions for revisions that resulted in major improvements in the book’s final form. The intention buried in earlier versions would never have been realized without their insight and encouragement. full

I

Clayton Koelb Chicago, Illinois

/

1

1

Part One

Disbelief

and Untruth

Chapter

Literature

and

1

Incredulity

Since practically the moment of its composition, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has been the center of critical debate about the relation of disbelief to literature. To be more accurate, Coleridge’s own theorizing about his poem has received the critical attention, particularly the famous passage in the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria in which he proposed the “suspension of disbelief as the definition of “poetic faith.” This formulation has become such an integral part of our critical culture that it is now virtually impossible to mention ’

the issue of literary disbelief without being told that, of course, is

it

what we suspend.

Coleridge evidently supposed that the possibility of his reader’s disbelief in the “shadows of imagination” in his poem presented a problem. He offers a solution in the form of a theory of “dramatic truth,” arguing that even if the objects of imitation are supernatural “shadows of imagination,” there is a need for poetic faith. That faith arises from our inward nature whence the unreal objects take on human interest and a semblance of truth. Coleridge does claim truth for the “Ancient Mariner,” but he ,

which the Aristotelian demand for probability is satisfied. The emotions described and engendered by the poem are “such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural calls

it

“dramatic truth,”

in

/

15

and Untruth

Disbelief

agency ." The suspension of disbelief is necessary only for the shadows of imagination, the supernatural things themselves, and it is requested in the service of a poetic faith that is justified 1

by the truth of the poem to inward nature. Coleridge thus proposes the suspension of disbelief as a kind of bridge to take us from one secure shore of faith to another. Our belief in the poem does not require our belief in the supernatural events it describes, since those supernatural events are not according to Coleridge the theorist the poem’s real subject. I will argue below that Coleridge’s poetic practice can be understood in another way, according to a theory other than

—

—

Coleridge’s, which reasserts the central importance of the supernatural events and the disbelief they engender. In this context, however, it is enough for us to note Coleridge’s claim that it was not those situations themselves but rather the “emotions as

would naturally accompany such situations” that were the poem’s central concern and that in effect those emotions depicted by the

poem

are indeed a just picture of a real original, that real original being our inward nature. A different approach might be to suppose that the reader’s

from being a problem, far from needing to be suspended, is actually something without which the poem would fail to work. And we can be certain that there has been at least one leader of the Ancient Mariner whose disbelief remained disbelief, far

intact: the self-reader, the

We can see this in the passage quoted above, in which he talks about the person who has believed himself under supernatural agency “from whatever souice of delusion. Two points of view emerge here: poet himself.

the one

belongs to the person suffering from the delusion, the one who believes the other apparently belongs to the writer, who recognizes that this belief has its source in delusion. The word ;

“delu-

sion” derives

one] false”

from a Latin expression meaning “playing [somewhose root is Indus, “game.” Coleridge’s formulation

proposes that such a that creates a

On

game

is

belief,

'Biographia Literana, chap.

/

16

present

boundary around

the inside there

Portable Coleridge

is

in his story, a false reality

an inside and an outside. generated out of the game

itself,

which

is

14. Quoted here from (New York: Viking, 1950), 512.

I.

A. Richards, ed.

The

Literature itself,

this

whereas on the outside there

game

from

is

and

Incredulity

only the recognition that

a falsehood.

The boundary

is

belief to disbelief,

from thinking

that the

is

marked by

the change

game

is

in fact

not a game but the real world, to recognizing that such thinking can exist only because the game fences off the real world. Inside

one may suppose the existence and indeed supreme power of “supernatural agency.” Outside it, one recognizes such agency as part of the game, as result of the delusion, or perhaps even that which itself constitutes the delusion. he Wedding Guest is one of the clearest examples of literathat boundary,

I

ture of a character

who

and what happens

to

is

the audience of an incredible story,

him seems

to

me

an excellent poetic

il-

an incredible text on a reader who is brought from disbelief to belief in that text’s word. I he process begins, not with a willing suspension of disbelief in the story, but with the unwilling suspension of belief in the world. he Guest is at first unwilling even to listen to the mariner. It is only the power of the story, the hypnotic power that glitters in the old man’s eye, that compels his reluctant assent. “He cannot choose but hear” (1. 18). It forces him to pay attention to the long narrative rather than to the wedding celebration, to advert to the word in preference to the world, to suspend his belief in that world and to transfer it finally to the word. Much effort has been expended by critics in attempts to find connections between the matter of the mariner’s tale and the safe, happy, convivial world of the wedding feast. But the point is surely that they are not connected, that in spite of the enormous attraction of this wedding world, and in spite of its reality the narration simply wipes it from the consciousness of the Wedding Guest. He becomes possessed and under compulsion, and he is thereby transformed from simply a reader of the tale into a character in it. This possession suffered by the Guest exactly parallels the experience of the mariner himself. We learn toward the poem’s end, as a kind of reply to the Hermit’s question (“What manner of man art thou?” [1. 577]), that the mariner, too, is under compulsion. The “strange power of speech” that compels the attention of the Guest also drives the mariner to tell his tale. The poem makes quite explicit the fact that the mariner is possessed lustration of the effects of such

I

,

by the need to

tell

his story:

/

17

Disbelief

and Untruth

Forthwith

this

frame

of

mine was wrenched

With a woful agony,

Which forced me

And

then

it

me

left

my

begin

to

tale;

free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns:

And

till

my

ghastly tale

This heart within

I

I

me

is

told.

burns.

pass, like night,

from land to land; have strange power of speech;

The moment that his face see, know the man that must hear me: To him my tale teach. I

I

I

[LI.

578-90]

turns out, then, that it is not the mariner who is victorious (“hath his will”) in his encounter with the Guest but rather that strange power of speech. I he Guest “cannot choose but heat that is, he is forced by the power that glitters in the mariner’s eye to be nothing but an audience, to turn his attention away from the world that calls him and to the word: It

The Bridgegroom’s doors And am next of kin;

are open wide,

I

1 he guests are met, the feast May’st hear the merry din.”

is

set:

[LI.

5-8]

But the mariner himself cannot choose but speak; he is the medium through which the supernatural agency of the power of speech does its work. When he uses his eye to immobilize the Guest, he is really using the power derived from his possession by language. I he mariner is indeed, as Wordsworth suggested, passive; he “does not act, but is continually acted upon.” But this observation, though it is absolutely accurate, is not the criticism it was meant to be, since this passivity before the word is exactly what the poem sets out to depict. The “Rime” elaborates its own phrase, “he cannot choose but hear.” It takes this locution in deadly /

18

Literature

and

Incredulity

earnest, so that an initially metaphorical “compulsion”

formed

is

trans-

dead crew and the living mariner are physically “possessed” by speech. The frame story shows that one of the features of this particular compulsion is is transferable. The mariner is able to “have his will” over that the Wedding Guest, to compel him to be a listener to his word, precisely because the mariner has no will apart from the volition of the power that possesses him. The Guest, too, is made into a believing reader, as he is wrenched completely free of his own context of wedding and fellowship, music and feasting, just as the mariner himself is driven by main force out of the normal world and into the word. But we, the readers who recognize all that happens as a “delusion,” remain outside the game and indeed want to remain there. We need the protection of our disbelief to keep from becoming, like the Wedding Guest, “stunned” and “of sense forlorn.” If we were to do as the mariner does, understand the power that overwhelms him as a real power, we would then have to see the mariner’s tale as the Guest does, as a terrifying force that eclipses the ordinary world of daily experience and leaves into a physical one: both the

it

us in a condition deprived (“forlorn”) of sense.

The “Ancient Mariner”

demonstrates that the “willing suspension of disbelief’ is the last thing a writer of supernatural tales should want in his readers. Coleridge himself never participated in the “delusion” that overcomes his characters, and neither should we. Of course this statement does not mean that the reader should rise up and condemn the untruth he recognizes, as some readers occasionally have done. But to yield our incredulity altogether would be no better. We must preserve, not suspend, our disbelief if we are to avoid the distressing fate of that paradigm of the naive reader, the Wedding Guest. Still,

vividly

one frequently hears arguments

vant to the reading of literature.

We

that disbelief

find such an

is

irrele-

argument

in

the doctrine that poetic statements are not really statements at

poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” to use Sidney’s glistening and authoritative phrase 2

all;

that, in short, the

.

- Defense

of Poesy.

/

19

Disbelief

According

and Untruth

to the sophisticated elaboration

of this sentiment, poutterances are a special class of utterance, to be labeled “pseudostatements” or “quasi-judgments” or the like and not to be believed or disbelieved. J. L. Austin may be quoted as an advocate of such a view: etic

Many

utterances which have been taken to be statements ... are not in fact descriptive, nor susceptible of being true or false. When is a statement not a statement? When it is a formula in a

when

calculus:

it

is

a

performatory utterance:

when

part of a work simply not the business of such utterances to coriespond to the facts” (and even genuine statements have other businesses besides that of so corresponding)^ of fiction

Austin of

It

.

.

.

it

is

is

remarks seem to hold good for most of the assertions novels and stories, since many of them are in any s

case not obviously either true or false. When Thomas Mann tells us that Director Weinschenk s afternoon visits repeated themselves in quick succession,” we accept the information as part of the story and pass no further judgment on it. But when Mann goes on to say that Weinschenk “gave utterance to the opinion that Romeo and Juliet was a play by Schiller,” it is essential to the effectiveness of the fiction that we take exception to 4

Weinschenk’s opinion A who was unable to detect the falsity of Weinschenk’s attribution of authorship would be incapable of understanding .

reader

the text. It is

easy to see, then, that

statements that are parts of a cannot be immune from criteria of truth or falsity. Numeious true and false statements statements that indeed are only effective in the fiction if they are believed to be true or false—can be embedded in a matrix of fictional statements not su )ject to such criteria. It is extremely important to regard carefully the distinction between criteria of truth and criteria of fictionality. Suppose I were to state with conviction the following: “Julius Caesar frequently remarked that Tokyo is the fic

all

tion

—

Ui

lCa

TJ :TPt ! Buddenbrooks

Papers 2d ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), 300. “Die ’

-

Nachmittagsbesuche Dider Meinuim S

rektor Weinschenks wiederholten sich in ” “ rascher Folge A usd ruck gab, Romeo und Julia’ sei ein Stuck von ” Schiller

/

20

131

Literature

largest city in Japan.”

though

Such

and

Incredulity

would obviously be false, would not be fictional. The

a statement

such a circumstance it statement attributed to Caesar and embedded in my utterance is perfectly true (Tokyo is indeed the largest city in Japan) even though Caesar’s remark is also fictional (Caesar obviously never said any such thing). Readers ordinarily take such things in their stride, easily recognizing fictional true statements, fictional false statements, and so forth. Certain rhetorical effects depend on the reader’s ability to make such distinctions. Criteria of truth and falsity (and thus also of belief) are applicable as well to statements not so much embedded in the fiction as constitutive of the fiction itself. Statements like “Weinschenk gave utterance to the opinion that” are ordinarily neutral with regard to such criteria, but they need not be. Suppose Mann had written, “The Buddenbrooks’ dog frequently embarrassed the family by giving utterance to the opinion that Romeo arid Juliet was a play by Schiller.” Such a fiction, based on an incredible premise, uses the evident untruth of its constitutive statements to entertain the reader. We accept such statements as necessary to the telling of the story, but our acceptance does not entail belief or prevent disbelief or require disbeliefs “suspension.” The case of the Buddenbrooks’ dog is an imaginary one, but Thomas Mann did occasionally employ incredible elements in his fictions. The following example illustrates how Mann presupposes our disbelief and uses it for literary effect. Schridaman, one of the principal characters in The Transposed in

Heads, overcome with depression, takes his

own head from

Such done.

a thing

And

is

yet

his

up

a

sword and severs

body.

quickly said, and

was not otherwise than quickly the narrator has here only one wish: that the lisit

tener not accept with indifference and thoughtlessness this statement as something ordinary and natural, simply because it is so often reported and appears in the records as ordinary, that people go around cutting off their own heads. The individual case is

never ordinary.

.

.

.

Self-beheading, no matter

how

often re-

performance of which is needed a monstrous determination and a terrible combination of all the vital and volitional powers; and that Schridaman with the soft spiritual eyes and the not particularly strong ported,

is

a practically undo-able deed, for the

Disbelief

and Untruth

brahmanly merchant’s arms managed to bring it off should not be accepted as something ordinary but should rather be taken with almost incredulous amazement .” 5

Mann

ironic

s

game depends upon

expectation that the reader will find his narration incredible, will not in fact believe it. 1 he pose of the earnest narrator, trying hard to convince a credulous audience that self-beheading is really quite unusual, is entertaining precisely because the audience is actually more inclined to disbelief than sophistication

is

his

the narrator himself.

is

unmasked

such outrageous nonsense

The

narrator’s

as relative naivete, since to believe

lengthy protestations notwithstanding, shows the narrator to be more credulous than the leader. 1 homas Mann therefore not only expects and tolerates his eadei s disbelief in this constitutive statement; he contrives at all,

1

the naiiation in such a

way

as to

make

an essential element in the tale’s ironic rhetoric. Neither Mann nor his reader has “suppressed” or “suspended” disbelief with regard to the marvelous elements in The Transposed Heads. But neither his nor our disbelief prevents our taking the story seriously or keeps us from being “good readers” in the

New

classic

As a result we are led we would probably all agree

Critical sense.

contradiction, since

example

this disbelief

— importing disbelief

to

an apparent

that

—

to take a

in Christianity into a read-

ing of Paiadise Lost w'ould indeed keep a person from being a “good reader.” The events of the Christian salvation history are constitutive elements in Milton’s

poem, just as self-beheading and magical healing are constitutive elements of Mann’s story. 5 Samtliche

Erzahlungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), 594-95. “Das ist schnell gesagt, und auch nicht anders als schnell zu tun. Und doch hat hier der Uberliefernde nur einen Wunsch: es mochte namlich der Lauscher die Aussage nicht gleichmutig-gedankenlos hinnehmen als etwas Gewohntes und Natiir-

nur weil es so oft Qberliefert ist und in den Berichten als etwas Gewohnliches vorkommt, dass Leute sich selber den Kopf abschnitten. Der liches,

Finzelfall

'

st

n e gewohnlich. ‘

.

.

.

Die Selbstenthauptung, so oft

sie berichtet sein

mag, ist eine fast untunliche Fat, zu deren griindlicher Ausfuhrung eine ungeheure Begeisterung und eine furchtbare Versammlung aller Lebens- und VV illenskrafte aul den Punkt der Vollbringung gehort; und dass Schridaman mit den gedankensanften Augen und den wenig wackeren brahmanischen Kaufmannsarmen, sie hier vollendete, sollte nicht wie etwas Gewohntes, sondern mit fast unglaubigem Staunen hingenommen werden.”

a

Literature

How

and

Incredulity

we can (indeed must) bring our disbelief to bear on the latter but cannot (indeed must not) on the former? The answer must be that Mann and his story invite and expect a disbelieving audience, while Milton and his poem invite and expect a believing one. Mann’s narrator, like the reporter of Lucian’s True History is one who “solicits the reader’s incredulity .” 6 It is of course rare to find a text whose writer exis it

that

,

plicitly

proclaims, as Lucian does, that he

disbelief

is

usually solicited in

some

is

a

liar.

The

reader’s

other, less direct fashion, as

The Transposed Heads. Whatever their method, however, a large class of fictions does solicit incredulity by speaking untruth. it

is

in

My and

interest in this investigation

is

principally in such fictions

unction of disbelief in our reading of them. I do not mean to imply by this restriction that disbelief cannot have a useful function in the reading of texts that do not invite it. I shall try to show below that Italo Calvino pursues just such a policy in reading scientific texts. Moreover, deconstructionist criticism might be seen as the productive application, to texts that present a surface calling for belief, of an uninvited (and perhaps unwelcome) skepticism about the possibilities of language. As Geofin the

f

Hartman

deconstruction is a refusal to believe that “the ‘presence of the word’ is equivalent to the

frey

describes

it,

presence of meaning. [It urges instead the opposite,] that the word carries with it a certain absence or indeterminacy of meaning.’’ Indeed, one form of deconstructionist commentary shows that literature “subverts all possible meanings by its ‘irony’

—

rhetorical or structural limit that prevents the dissolution of art

exploitative truth .’’ 7 Deconstruction, thus un-

into positive

and

derstood,

a kind of exploration of the relationship

is

poetry and untruth. disbelief,

one

It is

that bears

a valid

some

and

between

entirely justifiable use of

interesting relationships to the

remains something different. Deconstruction derives from a conception of language’s protean nature: just as we think we have caught hold of it, it turns into process

I

seek to describe. But

6 True History

(Alethes

Chapter 7. "Harold Bloom 1979),

historia),

A

4.

it

Lucian’s story will be discussed in detail in

et al.. Deconstruction

and

Criticism

(New York: Seabury

viii.

/

23

Press,

Disbelief

something

and Untruth

he fictions in which I am interested display a kind ol faith in language to pin down the nonexistent, to make something out of nothing, to manipulate the void. The difference between “the untruth of poetry” that deconstruction discloses and “the poetry of untruth” that I am about to describe

may seem

else.

I

But it is, for the moment, decisive. Another critical concern lying close to this inquiry, and yet crucially different, is the definition of the genre of “the fantastic. Such a definition has already been provided by Tzvetan I odorov in his well-known book on the subject. An examination of Todorov’s explanation of the fantastic will show clearly how different

a small one.

is

the object of

my

interest:

he fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time t

the hesitation

work

—

is

represented,

it

becomes one of the themes of the

in the case

of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as poetic

equal value.

may

An

These three requirements do not have and third constitute the genre; the second

interpretations. I

he

first

not be fulfilled

8 .

example of “the fantastic” thus defined (though it is once again my example and not Todorov’s) is Thomas Mann’s ideal

euily short story

he Wardrobe ( Der Kleiderschrank). Mann describes a certain Albrecht van der Qualen who, while riding the Berlin-Rome express and feeling somewhat sick and sleepy, I

decides to interrupt his journey at a particular little town at which the train happens to stop. He finds the place attractive

somehow and

decides to rent a room from a woman who reminds him of a “character out of E. T. A. Hoffmann .” 9 In this room is a perfectly ordinary wardrobe, but as van der Qualen is H

lhe Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre trans. Richard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33. ,

9S dm t liehe

/

Erzdhlungen, 122.

24

Howard

Literature

and

Incredulity

preparing for lied he notices that it is not empty. “Someone was standing inside, a shape, a being, so pure that Albrecht van der Qualen’s heart stood still a moment. She was perfectly naked and held one of her thin, tender arms upright and grasped with her index linger one of the hooks on the wardrobe’s ceiling .” 10 She emerges from the wardrobe, that night and who knows how many nights afterward, to tell Albrecht stories, “sad stories offering no consolation." The tale ends with the narrator’s asking, .

How

Who

.

.

Who

knows indeed if Albrecht van der Qualen actually awoke that afternoon and stopped over in that unknown town; if he did not rather remain sleeping in his first class carriage to be borne with incredible speed by the BerlinRome express over all the mountains? Who among us would undertake to provide with certainty and acting on his own authority an answer to this question? The whole thing is uncertain. “Everything must be up in the air.” 11 long did

it

last?

knows?

The

narrator himself emphasizes the ambiguity of the presentation. Either there really was a naked girl living in the wardrobe, or there w as not. If there was not, perhaps van der

Qualen had a vision. Perhaps the whole stopover in the town was a dream dreamed in the train. This hesitation between an understanding of the events of the story as marvelous or as natural (as the dream or hallucination of a sick man) is the essence of Todorov’s notion of the fantastic. The reader cannot know with certainty

how

One need

to “explain” the events

only compare

of the

fiction.

“The Wardrobe”

The Transposed Heads to see the difference between Todorov’s subject and mine. There is nothing ambiguous about the self-beheadings or the to

124-25. “Jemand stand darin, eine Gestalt, ein Wesen, so hold, dass van Sie war ganz Albrecht der Qualens Herz einen Augenblick stillstand. nackt und hielt einen ihrer schmalen, zarten Armen empor, indem sie mit dem Zeigefinger einen Haken an der Decke des Schrankes undasste.” wer weiss es? Wer weiss auch nur, 'Ibid., 126. “Wie lange dauerte das ob uberhaupt Albrecht van der Qualen an jenem Nachmittage wirklich erwachte und sich in die unbekannte Stadt begab; ob er nicht vielmehr in seinem Coupe erster klasse verblieb und von deni Schnellzuge Berlin-Rom mit ungeheurer Geschwindigkeit iiber alle Berge getragen ward? Wer unter uns mochte sich unterfangen, eine Antwort aid diese Frage mit Bestimmtheit und auf seine Verantwortung hin zu vertreten? Das ist ganz ungewiss. ‘Alles muss in der Luft 1

°I bid

.

,

.

.

.

1

.

stehen.’

.

.

,

”

/

25

Disbelief

and Untruth

healing that follows in the latter tale. They are the central events of the fiction, and they are plainly and clearly incredible. The narrative allows the reader nation of what happens to

no possibility for a “natural” explaSchridaman and his friends. If the self-beheading is a delusion, it at any rate encompasses the entire universe of the novella. The naked girl in the wardrobe, on the other hand, is readily understood as a dream vision, given the hero’s abnormal state of mind at the time he sees her. In The Transposed Heads, nothing “is up in the air”; in “The Wardrobe,” everything

is.

The unambiguous Transposed Heads

though

is

quality of the incredible elements in The a characteristic of another genre examined,

by Todorov. This is the so-called marvelous. The realm of the marvelous is characterized by the presence of “supernatural” elements that remain unexplained (as for example the miraculous healing of the severed heads), though in various subgenres “the supernatural is somewhat justified.” Thus the “hyperbolic marvelous” simply exaggerates (serpents that could swallow elephants and so forth) but “does less centrally,

do excessive violence other reasons to

pure

in the

state

Other subgenres present prevent the reader’s outright incredulity. Only of the marvelous is the reader given no expla-

nation, justification,

described I

his

subject.

to reason.

or excuse for the supernatural events

12 .

puie marvelous comes very close to coinciding with my It does not quite do so, for this reason: Todorov focuses

on the his

supernatural quality of events narrated to characterize genre. I am interested instead in that which is incredible,

whether supernatural or vine,

or

not.

What

Christian,’ marvelous, in

we to make of the “diwhich some narrated events are

are clearly supernatural but are nevertheless intended to be (and by ^ sympathetic reader in fact are) believed? With God all things are possible. Todorov would probably call this

another

“imperfect” subgenre, but my point is still the same. focus attention more on the matter of disbelief, the

I

wish to

and on the character of the events that for whatever reason, are disbelieved. To cut off one’s own head may reader’s

also the writer’s,

l

-

and

less

Iodorov, Fantastic, 54—57.

/

26

Literature

and

Incredulity

or may not be “supernatural,” depending on how we understand that term, but it is certainly incredible. That Romeo and Juliet

is

a play by Schiller

is

something we do not

believe, but the

notion does not partake of the supernatural. Still, the literature of the marvelous will igure prominently in this study, since the f

incredible

and the marvelous form very

identical, classes.

similar,

though not

Chapter

A Taxonomy

2

of Untruth

My

subject, then, is the function of disbelief as an integral part of the process of reading literature. It is evident, however, that we do not always apply disbelief to all literary texts, nor, when we do, do we apply it always in the same way. We have reasons for not believing texts, and the usual reason we

would

give, surely,

that these texts are untrue. Since the relationship between disbelief and untruth is not necessarily selfevident, it is appropriate now to explain why I see the two as indissolubly connected and to indicate what I understand that is

connection to be. first

of

all,

we should note

that believing (and thus also disbelieving) a statement or collection of statements is not quite the

same thing

as believing, or believing “in,” other things. Belief in

statements always means an acceptance of those statements as true, while believing other things may not carry

such an implicaof the distinction, and of its difficulties, is provided by the case of the man who claimed that, while he knew that the earlh turned on its axis, he did not believe it; he believed, he said, that the sun rose in the east and went down in the west. His difficulty might suggest that belief and truth are separable and that one can believe something that one knows to be untrue. Such a notion of belief would stress a kind of intuitive giasj) ol a state of affairs, a correspondence between our pertion.

A good

illustration

ceptions and actuality, between phenomenon and noumenon It would suggest that belief comes from the powerful (though de/

28

A Taxonomy

of

Untruth

ceptive) evidence of the senses, while

knowledge of the truth has a distant source removed by many steps of reasoning from the evidence of the senses. Belief would be immediate, while truth would be mediated by processes of reasoning. Actually, though we can understand and can even accept such distinctions, we must recognize that, far from implying the incompatibility of truth and belief, the man’s confession implies only the distinction between believing statements and believing states of affairs. If asked “Do you believe the statement that the earth rotates on its axis?” the man would have had to reply in the affirmative: he would have had to believe because that is all he could mean by saying that he “knew” that the earth did so. What he “knew” was the truth of the statement. That he did not believe the fact did not mean that he did not believe the statement of the fact. Believing a statement entails accepting

it

as true.

For the purposes of this investigation, it is appropriate to understand “untruth” as the product of disbelief applied to statements. To say that a text is untrue is to say that someone does not believe it. Statements are true if and only if someone believes them. I realize that such a definition of untruth ignores certain difficulties of interest to philosophers, but the simplification involved is a necessary and proper one. It is possible, of course, to posit such interesting complications as the case of “accidental” or unintentional truth, that is, when someone suggests something neither he nor his auditors believe but that turns out to be true. Are not such statements actually “true” even though no one

them

time they are uttered? If Aristophanes, for example, were to have said that the “fixed stars” were hurtling believes

at the

through space at very high speeds, his statement would not have been believed even by himself. We know, however, that such a statement is true, and since we believe it, we readily suppose that our belief in some sense transcends time. Since our interest here is language and specifically literary language, it follows that we are concerned with the relation not simply between states of affairs in the world and statements between speakers/writers, lisbut rather about them teners/readers, utterances/texts, and states of affairs in the not appropriate for us to investigate the correspondences or lack of them between the world and the word that is world.

It is

—

/

29

Disbelief

and Untruth

the province of philosophy and science. rather with what those who speak and

We

must be concerned apprehend words suppose about the relation between language and reality. The scientist may, perhaps even must, disregard the attitude of the writer and the reader in assessing the truth of statements, but literary theor ists must place those attitudes at the center of their attention. They must do so because their aim is, after all, knowledge not about the “actual relationship between statements and reality, but rather about the way in which literary language functions in

human

context of authors and readers. Considered in such a context, “untruth” can only come into being when a text is disbelieved either by its author or by one of its leaders. A simple taxonomy of untruth might be made, one would suppose, by arranging the various combinations of believits

and disbelieving authors/speakers with believing and disbelieving readers/listeners. Such a taxonomy would be simple, but it would also be relatively useless. When we say something we do not believe or disbelieve something said to us, we invariing

ably

make

certain assumptions about the attitude of the other party, speaker or listener, involved in the speech act. When, for instance, we disbelieve a statement made to us, we do so in the specific context of

an attitude toward the speaker whose

utter-

ance we do not believe. In the first place, we try to decide whether the speaker believed the statement he or she made. If we suppose that the speaker did believe what we do not, we are likely to suppose that the statement was an error, while if we suppose that the speaker did not believe it, we will probably suspect that he or she was trying, unsuccessfully, to deceive us. Any taxonomy of untruth must take into account this kind of assumption. Iheie is a further complication. Because we make assumptions not only about the other party’s attitude toward the statement but also about that party’s expectations about our attitude, the disbelieving listener will not only try to guess whether or not the speaker believed the statement uttered but will also attempt to decide whether or not the speaker expected our belief. A disbelieving listener said,

also

who

posits a disbelieving

speaker may, as I suppose that the speaker was lying but will do so only if it is posited that the speaker expected and wanted the listener’s /

30

A Taxonomy belief.

If,

of

on the other hand, the disbelieving

disbeliving speaker

who

in fact

expects

t

Untruth listener posits a

lie listener’s

disbelief,

and something other than lying is involved. Boccaccio’s argument in The Genealogy of the Pagan

the situation

is

cpiite dif ferent,

Gods that poets are not this distinction,

liars

can be restated

which we see made

of poetry: poets are not liars

readers’ belief, even

in

terms

defense because they do not expect their

though they do

explicit in Sidney’s

in fact say

know unless we

things they

We may

to be untrue.

of precisely

not call a speaker/author a liar have reason to suppose both conditions: first, that he or she did not believe the statement, and second, that he or she expected

and

solicited the audience’s belief.

These belong

to the “felicity

conditions’’ for the illocutionary act of lying.

A

similar set of distinctions

must be made when we regard

“untruth” from the point of view of the disbelieving speaker. If he or she expects a believing listener who will in turn posit the speaker’s belief, the goal in speaking will be lying as we normally understand it. If, on the other hand, that same disbelieving speaker expects a believing listener who will suppose that the speaker disbelieves, we have a different form of deception that we might call “Iagoism.” When Othello asks Iago, “Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?” and Iago replies, “Cassio, my lord! No, sure, I cannot think it, / T hat he would sneak away so guiltylike, / Seeing your coming,’’ Iago explicitly disbelieves his statement about “sneaking away” (he knows Cassio has no reason to sneak, having arranged the whole business), he wants Othello to suppose that he disbelieves it (since he wishes Othello to think Iago is Cassio’s defender and friend), and he confidently expects Othello to believe it (as Othello indeed does). This convoluted deception follows directly on the heels of another in a slightly different form. When Iago denies that it was Cassio, he disbelieves his statement, expects Othello to disbelieve it, but intends Othello to think that Iago does (erroneously) believe it. This “intentional error” differs from both ordinary lying and Iagoism because of the different assumptions and intentions of the speaker in making a statement which he (or she) does not believe.

1

'We can make scheme of three

a table

showing the various

differentiae:

possibilities

derived from

this

Disbelief

and Untruth

My

interest lies in texts that solicit the reader’s disbelief tha is, literary situations in which the reader supposes that the author neither believed the text nor expected the audience lelieve it. Such texts form a particular illocutionary mode a special way of doing something in the act of speaking/writing. e do not have a common name for utterances in this illocutionary mode, as we do for “lies,” but the absence of such a name shows only that insufficient attention has been paid to this class of speech acts, not that it does not exist. I will

m

mode

this

call

utterances

apistic fictions” (“apistic”

in

from the Greek apistos, “incre lble and will limit my study to that form of untruth. An credible fiction is one we disbelieve; an apistic fiction is one we disbelieve because our disbelief is somehow solicited. )

I

leave

will

other theorists the examination of the other modes (lying, agostm, and so forth) indicated by the taxonomv 2 But even the limitation of the apistic mode does not sufficiently define the kind of text f wish to examine. We will have to to

one more

ac

criterion to complete this that criterion will have to separate

and

taxonomy of untruth

the genuinely “untrue”

from the others. The criterion I propose is the presence or absence of an intention to communicate the truth. s everyone knows who has ever spoken ironically, fictions

possi-

it is

Hie speaker/author disbelieves A.

B.

his own utterance and expects a believing listener/reader who posits the speaker’s belief 1[successful lying] posits the speaker’s disbelief 2. [Iagoism expects a disbelieving listener/reader

who

posits the speaker’s belief [intentional errorl posits the speaker’s disbelief [apistic fiction]

.

2. II

ie listener/reader disbelieves what is said to A. posits a believing speaker/author

him and

who

expects the listener’s belief [simple error] CtS l e llStener S disbelief [dogged assertion] Ui,?aP disbelieving a . r posits 1

•

’

B. B

speaker/author

l 2 ‘

ex P ects ex P ects

who

listener’s belief [unsuccessful lying] listener’s disbelief [apistic fiction]

HA2

STS

AW includes a useful anoendix of ologians on the subject of lying.

-r

been U1

bussed, 13

(New YorkL °R '"'I Randoni “h** Hous e,

*

P

S

'

r10,11

B°k

but

’

it is

^

1978).

vaMOUS philosophers and

She

the-

A Taxonomy ble to

make an

incredible statement

and

of Untruth

at the

same time

to

intend that statement to convey true information. lie name commonly given to this manner of speaking is allegory, though 1

Boccaccio used fabula to designate its use in poetry. “In the simplest terms,” says Angus Fletcher, “allegory says one thing

and means another.” 3 Such an intentional breakdown in the relation between signifier and signified makes allegory one of the most interesting and at the same time most dangerous modes of expression. But the term “allegory” and the concept to which it refers are in reality far broader than the apistic mode wish to discuss. Although the “hidden” meaning of an allegory is often intended to be some form of truth, it need not be so. One can imagine allegories in which the deeper sense would be nonsense (though it is hard to think of examples). Furthermore, the superficial level of an allegory need not be, and often is not, incredible. An allegory need not solicit our disbelief to be an I

For these reasons, I propose that a more accurate name for the submode of apistic fictions that intend to communicate the truth would be “alethetic” (which I intend here to mean “truthful though incredible”) fictions. Many, though not all, allegories are alethetic fictions, though all alethetic fictions may be called allegories. One common form of the alethetic apistic mode (and thus also of “allegory”) is irony. We are all familiar with this form of utterance in which what is said is intended to be disbelieved but in the service of some other (often opposite) truth: return home from the snowy, traffic-choked streets saying, “Lovely weather we re having!” Although I will have to pay some attention here to the alethetic mode, and particularly to its important literary forms, allegory and irony, my concern is really with the other sort of apistic fiction, the kind that does not seek to convey any truth at all. This is untruth in its purest form, the opposite of “truthful” or alethetic fiction, the lethetic mode. This is the manner of speaking in which neither the speaker nor the listener believes what is said, neither posits belief on the part of the other, and neither supposes that the untruth spoken is merely a surface behind allegory.

I

3 Allegory :

2

The Theory

oj a Symbolic

Mode

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964),

.

/

33

)

and Uni ruth

Disbelief

which some sort of truth is hidden. It is not duplicitous, for it is neither mendacious nor “allegorical.” It speaks, and it intends nothing more than what it says, thought what it says may be very complex and though what it says is credited by no one. Since I have coined the terms “alethetic” and “lethetic,” I should tell the reader precisely what I intend and do not intend by them. I have derived my designations from the Greek aletheia tiuth rather than from the more familiar Latin verus for a

(

)

number

of reasons. First and foremost, I want to distinguish clearly between the notions developed here and the more common conceptions of literary truth derived from mimetic theories of poetry. From the Latin we have “verisimilar” and “verisimilitude,” familiar ways of naming the quality of being “true to life.” I hese ideas of poetic truth obviously depend upon a concept of

and

likeness,

that concept

is

far

removed from the

fictional alethetic. Verisimilar literature strives to be like the world, so like it in fact that we are brought as far as to believe it. Aristotle’s theory of poetry, even including his theory of the marvelous, supposes that the

mode

I

have called

“incredible” ( apithanos is the thing most studiously to be avoided if a poem is to be successful Alethetic fictions, on the other hand, like Boccaccio’s fabulae! are deliberately incredible; they use the reader’s disbelief to foice the reader to look for the hidden kernel of truth promised by tradition. Alethetic fictions are truthful, in their fashion, but they are never verisimilar.

Another, though far less important, reason for my choice of the term alethetic” is that is possesses no extraneous and confusing meanings derived from other contexts. I advance this claim in spite of the fact that the notion of aletheia has been treated at length and in detail by Martin Heidegger in various writings, including particularly the essay “The Origin of the .” Work of Art Only readers with some 1

Heidegger

s

writings could

make

acquaintance with a connection between his

thoughts on art and aletheia and mine on alethetic fictions. But such readers, familiar as they would be with Heidegger’s philosophy, would recognize instantly that I have in mind nothing as ‘Quotations from this essay are from the translation by Albert Hofstadter y

Marper

& Ro w°i97l)'

8Ser

'

S

CSSayS

^ N™

Thou

(CandiridLe Harvard (Cambridge. M f’n University ,’

'

to bring

'

C

Whl,man

'

ed.

Aristophanes

Press, 1964), chap. 5.

it

off, if you'll

(New York: and

the

Hill

and

Comm Hew

The Rhetoric

me

of Unreality

163—64). But this trust does not require that he be believed by die audience, which stands outside the circle; it requires only that he persuade the birds of the play, who are inside it. Even some characters themselves, we should note, do not actually believe Pisthetairos: Iereus the Hoopoe, the first of the birds to be converted to Pisthetairos’s scheme, is thoroughly persuaded of the value of this happy idea, but he is also thoroughly incredulous. When the chorus asks trust

Iereus,

pithoisthe moi ]"

[ei

“What are

(11.

the words he [Pisthetairos] speaks,” the

Hoopoe

replies, “Incredible things, beyong hearing [apista km pern kluein ]” (11. 415— 16). b His enthusiasm for the grand scheme

bound up

is

with

its

and there

incredibility,

is

no

better

way

to

express that enthusiasm than by stressing that the plan is not to be believed: “He speaks of some great bliss neither sayable nor believable

megan

[legei

421-22). As

it

tin ’

olbon

oute

lekton

oute piston ]”

(11.

turns out (and as Tereus well knows), the plan

is

neither beyond hearing ( pern kluein) nor past telling ( oute lekton ): its

power

consists entirely in Pisthetairos’s ability to speak of

persuasively. But

it

is

incredible

power over the listener/reader willing to

let

(

apista

,

oute piston ),

and

it

has

precisely because he or she

disbelief function in the lethetic

it

is

mode, turning

away from the world, which the text ignores, to the word, which it celebrates. The paradox of Pisthetairos’s success at speaking the unspeakable is the paradox of all self-referential, logomimetic language, which does not worry about the connection, or lack of it, between speech and the world. Since the reader through his disbelief has, like the Hoopoe, been willing to accept such a disjunction of word and world, Pisthetairos’s oratory concerning the power of words (that is, birds) is highly persuasive. For this attention

readings of the Birds are unsatisfaca real sense destructive of the play’s ef fect. To seek

reason attempts tory

and

in

at alethetic

connections, though hidden ones, between the text and reality is an activity that can only undermine the text’s most crucial as-

comma

between pern and

explaining that pera kluein is 416, p. 52). But pern legem is neither “good Greek nor good attested in Sophocles, according to Liddell and Scott, and therefore it is hard to hat it is not believe that a precisely analogous expression would be bad Greek. good sense says nothing against it, given the context. '’Rogers puts a

kluein

sense” (note to

,

v.

1

/

65

The Lethetic Genre sumption. I he issue is not whether one allegorical interpretation or another is correct: it is rather that the very idea of allegorical

interpretation fiction.

A

would stand

in

Aristophanes find one,

incompatible

with

the

of correct alethetic reading, if we could opposition to the rhetoric it claimed to is

idea

clarify.

here is no reason to be surprised, then, that Pisthetairos himself shares the disbelief of his audience and of the Hoopoe in the truth of his city in the air. It would be inconsistent for him to believe in the marvelous things he has created, since it is the nature of the marvelous to engender disbelief. When a messenger informs him that the city’s wall has been constructed by I

the birds in practically

marvel.

no time, even

Do you marvel

come thos

1167).

(1.

true!”

7

is

\thaumazeis] that the building

so quickly?” asks the chorus truth it seems to me like pseudesin]"

Pisthetairos

Dudley

(11.

lies

made

to

was done

1164-65), and he replies, “In [isa gar alethos phainetai moi

Fitts’s translation,

“Why,

it’s

a

lie

captures the comic juxtaposition oi' aleand pseudesin but obscures the basic issue: the untruths have brilliantly

been transformed into truth. Pisthetairos acknowledges that, considered in teims of a correspondence between representanot

tion

and

reality

Pisthetairos

knows how disappear.

— that

is,

“in

truth

— these

marvels are

lies.

not a poet on the model of Aristotle’s Homer, who to “lie as one ought” and can make the incredible

is

On

the contrary, he thrusts the untruth in front of the audience’s eyes. His is not the rhetoric of the eikos, which seeks to persuade the audience of the appropriateness of its representation: his is the rhetoric of the lethetic mode, which seeks to persuade us to forget, to loose the surly bonds of earth, to let his winged words carry us away. In commenting on the excellences of the Birds, Gilbert Norwood suggests that the only possible flaw to be found in the play

would arise from our belief in it: “to enjoy the wildest story we must entertain a spurious momentary belief in it; and if we

do,”

we 1

find ourselves misunderstanding Aristophanes. 8

Norwood

is

Four Comedies (New York: Harcourt, Brace Sc World, 1957), 217. Comedy, 242. 1 he rest of the quotation, though not exactly relevant to my argument, is worth recording: “and if we do, the Basileia passage might seem more suited to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound than to Aristophanic drollery. But Aristophanes: (•ieek

/

66

The Rhetoric of Unreality surely right to suppose that a “spurious

momentary

belief’

our enjoyment of the Birds, though my reasons for thinking so are quite different from his. But why in the same breath does he insist that such belief is essential to

would be detrimental

to

indeed “spurious,” that is, “illegitimate, invalid, false,” then it hardly seems necessary. Aristophanes goes out of his way to make sure that the chances for such spurious moments of belief are minimized, and we have no reason to assume (aside from those reasons advanced by Aristotelian notions of representation) that we cannot do entirely without them. Norwood, acute critic that he is, is sensitive to the necessity of disbelief to the success of the Birds, but he cannot rid himself of the received idea that poetry cannot function without belief. The result is that his position is quite self-contradictory and stands a testimony to the power both of Aristophanes and of Aristotle. In spite of the never-ending attempts to find ways to read the Birds in the alethetic mode, critics like Norwood and, more recently, Cedric Whitman have argued effectively against alle“enjoy the wildest story”? If such belief

gorizing the play.

Norwood

is

is

blunt:

In the Birds [Aristophanes’] purpose, for

anyone not obsessed with

research-mongering, is almost too obvious to state: it was the workWe should hardly be justiing out of a glorious comic fancy. fied even in asserting that it satirizes the irresponsible day-dreams of man (whether Greek or barbarian) in his weaker moments. No one at all is derided: this is a fairy-tale gloriously funny and .

.

.

gloriously told 9 .

Dudley the

Fitts

agrees that

[satirical] attack this

time

is

of less importance than the creation

dream of Cloudcuckooland the Beautiful, that ideal commonwealth in the skies. Elaborate political reconstructions of the dream have been made classical scholarship is ingenious and tireless but they seem, in all their complexity, pas-

of a comic dream, the

—

—

we have no business to harbour memories of Shelley and other more orthodox writers on the divine government; this passage is only another proof of the unHehraic lightness wherewith Athenians could on occasion take their religion.” 9 Ibid., 241.

/

67

The Lethetic Genre times better suited to the academies of Cloudcuckooland than to the enrichment of our understanding 10

itself

.

he most sophisticated and stimulating reading of the play to date is that of Cedric Whitman, who goes beyond the nonetheless important assertion of the primacy of the “comic fancy” or comic dream. W hitman realizes that the play is a logomimesis, I

that

it

is

remarks

built

on the notion

of the

power of speech. Whitman

that

when we speak

language [the language of absurdity], we play with words and give them a primacy over their meanings which inverts our usual sense of reality. I he Birds plays with language in a way far beyond any of the other comedies, and the sense of reality undergoes considerable change by consequence. The this

.

word

.

.

creates consciousness,

and its enormous vitality stubbornly resists fact. A word becomes an image or metaphor, and the image or metaphor lives in the mind, independent of reason and far more compelling. Images and metaphors are dream substance and make dream worlds, and every world is an absurdity, a is all, it

.

verbal nothing

.

.

11 .

Whitman provides evidence from

the writings of Gorgias that

such a view of the “priority of language” over reality existed among the ancient Greeks and that thus to interpret Aristophanes does not do historical violence, by introducing modern ideas of relativism, subjectivism,

and the question of the relation between reality and language .” 12 As the argument I have made so far would indicate, am in general agreement with Whitman’s approach. Brilliantly insightful though it is, however, I think his reading is a little misleading in one area. That Aristophanes plays with words and “gives them a primacy over their meanings” is beyond dispute: Whitman s analysis of the Birds would alone be enough to make it so. But that such wordplay “inverts our usual sense of reality” remains a highly doubtful contention. The distinction, the lack of correspondence, between language and reality is the essence of I

U) Four

Comedies, 159.

"Comic Hero, 172—73. '-Ibid., 173.

/

68

The Rhetoric disbelief,

and the

Birds goes out of

audience’s disbelief.

The

issue

is

of Unreality

way

be sure of its not “reality” but power, not its

to

whether words have the ability to make new and separate worlds (what M. H. Abrams has called “heterocosms”), 13 but whether

word has the power to function independently of the world, to take our attention away from reality in a head-to-head contest. “Speech,” says Whitman, “assists and directs the ‘subjective restructuring of the world,’ and thus occupies a position of power analogous to, if not identifiable with, divinity itself .” Such the

a statement

romantic brams. 14

seems

view'

less

applicable to Aristophanes than to the

of the function of literature as analyzed by A-

assumes that the reader’s belief is essential if the heterocosm, the “subjective restructuring of the world,” is to be accepted. Aristophanes quite clearly does not want our belief, our agreement that his play is a representation of a world that is “probable” if indeed also “impossible.” There is no restructuring of the world, subjective or otherwise, in the play. The world goes its own way, untouched, unrestructured. This disagreement notwithstanding, Whitman’s discussion of the Birds in Aristophanes and the Comic Hero remains one of the most acute readings of a lethetic text that I know of. Whitman understands, though he does not formulate that understanding as I would, that the fiction is founded upon logomimesis. He notes that the opening of the play is based on what he calls a “dramatized metaphor,” the Greek slang phrase es korakas elthein, “to go to the crows” (equivalent to the English “go to the dogs”). “The metaphor in hand may be no more than simple slang, but to stage two characters who pace out the actual steps of ‘going to the birds’ has the unmistakable effect of putting language itself in the controlling position.” 15 It is an operation would call the one finds frequently in lethetic fictions, what transformation of topos into atopos, of rhetorical commonplace into the outrageous. It is useful to recall that Liddell and Scott even propose “paradox” as one of the meanings of atopos. The rhetoric of the Birds is composed of a use of tropes that goes against expectation, para ten doxan by rendering the comI

bis position

I

,

x3 The 1

Mirror and

‘Ibid.,

l5 Comic

the

Lamp (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1953), 272

278, for instance. Hero, 175.

/

69

ft

.

The Lethetic Genre monplace “out of place” ( atopos = “without place”). Its suasion (peitho) works neither through nor toward the doxa of the audience, as to

is

the case with ordinary rhetoric, but exactly counter

it.

The

Birds' rhetoric

terested.

for

persuasiveness, highly disintransformation of topos into atopos takes lan-

The

is,

all its

guage that we assume to be connected normal place, severs cleanly its bonds to splendidly in the

to the reality,

world from

and

lets

it

its

float

does not wish to convince us that we, too, should “go to the crows”: it is not utopian propaganda. The city of

air. It

Cloudcuckooland

for us to reach that, after all,

is

it

not utopia but atopia, and there is no way except on the wings of sovereign speech. But is

what the peitho of Pisthetairos

tells

us

all

along,

language can do the impossible and incredible. That it can does not, however, make the impossible and incredible any more possible or credible than they were before. Reality is unaffected by the power of speech, though opinions may be changed by it. Aristophanes shows over and over again how language can be both omnipotent and totally ineffectual at the same time. And from time to time he lets us glimpse the fact that, were we not sure of the ineffectuality, the omnipotence would be neither exhilarating nor entertaining. It would be horrifying. The metamorphosis of topos into atopos takes place under that

circumstances that are carefully fenced off from the situations to be encountered in the “real” world that conforms to doxa. And indeed one of the most certain methods a text can use to estabthe magic circle that surrounds a lethetic fiction is to display such metamorphoses, to show us its logomimesis. Such a display reminds us that incredulity is called for, if only to keep us safe from the power such transformations represent. It would be, at the very least, extremely uncomfortable and unsettling to live in lish

a world in

which a fundamental principle of the universe, “spin” important enough to be worthy of worship as a god, ( dinos ), turns out to be a big pot {dinos). That this happens in the Clouds is both very funny and potentially very disquieting, funny to us

who

stand safely outside the circle but a cause of real discomfiture for poor Strepsiades. We may laugh to watch Pisthetairos reveal and then realize his plan to turn the polos (“celestial split e ) of the buds into a polls city ), but we do so secure in ( i

/

70

The Rhetoric of Unreality

knowledge

the

that the

world

permit such things. It is for this reason that

Dudley

Fitts

Whitman

who

I

in

which we actually

must disagree with

insist that “ The Birds

is

live

does not

critics

such as

not a play of escape.” u]

contends that the play ought not to be seen as “an escapist manifesto.” 17 Both Fitts and Whitman are of course attempting to defend Aristophanes against a charge that critics are fond of leveling against works they disapprove of, since the word “escapist” is always meant in the most disparaging sense possible. But just because the charge of escapism that critics make is silly we ought not to dismiss the concept it misuses. The Birds does rely to some degree on the need to escape, not from Athens, but from the ambiguities of language that make Cloudcuckooland possible, into the privileged safety enjoyed by the audience of a fiction. Our incredulity allows us to escape the consequences of living in a logomimetic universe. It is a wonderful place to visit, but we can be glad that we do not have to live there. Those who do have to live there are igures of terror. By encouraging us to retain our disbelief, the lethetic fiction can present what is terrifying, can let us both take part in and escape from it at the same time. will discuss lethetic horror in detail in Chapter 6. For now, I want just to suggest that a literary work may be both “escapist” and valuable without contradiction. For the birds in the play, the transformation of the polos into also

f

I

change from topos to atopia. Pisthetairos explains to the Hoopoe, who is not quite sure what is meant by polos, since it is an unusual word, even for a Greek, that it means a polis

is

literally a

simply topos: the birds’ “place” (1. 180). The birds give up their real place, the polos, for an imaginary polis that exists only through the power of the trope. This transformation is paralleled by another, the change of the birds themselves from speechless barbarians to masters of language and of the marvels

language can generate. Thus they move from being themselves aloga (“dumb animals”) to having power over aloga (“inexplicable things”). And as the birds become the rulers of atopia, we find that the gods of Olympus are reduced to aloga, barbarthat

l6Four Comedies, 17

159 Comic Hero, 168 .

.

The Lethetic Genre ians unable to utter coherent speech. Pisthetairos changes, too,

not simply by

becoming himself

coming more secure

a

winged creature, but by be-

mastery over language. Phis mastery involves not only the making of speeches but also the interpretation of the utterances of others. At crucial points in the play, the most important form of rhet01 ic

is

in his

the rhetoric of reading, which

based on such interpretaI he opening scene of the play is a scene of reading in which Pisthetairos and his companion Euelpides try to interpret the croaking and cawing of a couple of birds. They have purchased these two, a crow and a jackdaw, as guides to help them find the man-turned-bird Tereus, from whom they wish to learn about the various cities he has flown over. I hey want to find a better spot than Athens to which to “retire.” Tereus, having been a man, can be expected to speak Greek, but to find him the two Athenians must follow the advice of aloga, the crow and jackdaw. Doing so presents considerable difficulties, not because is

tion.

the biids

fail

to find their

way

ereus, but because the men aie unable to understand what their calls and gestures mean. to

I

Euelpides keeps asking Pisthetairos what his bird has to say: “What does your crow say about the road?” (1. 23). Of course the crow has nothing at all to say, dumb creature that it is. Though it has wings to fly, it has no winged words. The men are in

no

better condition themselves: they are able to speak, but they have not yet developed their skills to the point where they

can

take wing. Euelpides describes their departure

from Athens as “winging away from our homeland on both feet aneptomesth ek tes patridos amphoin podoin ]” (1. 35). The speechless birds and the ’

[,

wingless

men

are trying to fly on their feet, but Aristophanes suggests they will only succeed when they learn to take off on the metrical “feet” of poetic speech. Until then there is no way for them to “find the way,” and they are faced with an aporia, a lack ol passage. “We’re ready and willing to go to the crows,” says Euelpides, and yet we are not capable of finding the way [ epeita me xeurein dunasthai ten hodon ]” (1. 29). The dunamis (power, capability) that is lacking will be supplied by Pisthetairos’s rhet’

power over language, including the power to read the language of others. This is the power to make “feet” into wings. he birds ability to speak and Pisthetairos’s to understand are oric, ins

1

The Rhetoric of Unreality perfectly linked in the play, by the logic of juxtaposition,

by cause and effect.

We

if

not

learn later that Tereus has “taught

language [edidaxa ten phonen ]” to the birds, who had formerly been “barbarians” (11. 199—200). But before Pisthetairos “sees” his grand scheme, the only birds in the play (excepting the manbird Tereus and his servant) are such speechless barbarian birds, the crow and jackdaw, whose mouths are good only for biting (11. 25—26). The revelation of the birds’ ability to speak comes after Pisthetairos has demonstrated his ability to speak by convincing the Hoopoe of the magnificence of his plan. Thus, although we are told that Tereus taught the birds language long since, what we witness is a dramatic change from barbarian birds to fully articulate, civilized civis = polis) creatures deserving a city to house their civilization. I’he aporia that results first from the Athenians' losing their way, then from the unacceptability of the Hoopoe’s suggestions for a better hometown, is made to vanish through the sudden acquisition by both man and bird of an awesome power of speech. The dunamis that had been lacking is supplied by Pisthetairos’s logos. The birds of the chorus urge him to share with them the wonderful thing he has, “some power greater than my stupid wits can detect [dunamin tina meizo paraleipomenen hup ernes phrenos axunetou ]” (11. 455—56). The power to change a polos into a polis is more than sufficient to (

’

make

the birds into gods.

Inside the magic circle of the lethetic fantasy, rhetoric

only the result of an aporia but

its

solution. 18

is

not

The gap between

trope and persuasion ceases to exist when it is no longer necessary to concern ourselves with the relation of language to the world.

When

the entire universe of discourse

is

discourse, tropes

—

become arguments and very persuasive arguments at that. Here is a situation in which the figural nature of language cannot mislead us, where the undecidability between dinos/spin and dinos/pot may be transformed from a problem into the solution to all problems. If there is no more difference between the sky and a city than an iota, no more difference between birds and the power of speech than the literalization of a metonymy, then IK

de Man’s argument, culminating on p. 3 of Allegories Reading, that rhetoric exists as “the aporia between trope and persuasion." I

refer here to Paul

1

1

/

73

of

9

9

The Lethetic Genre those

who

control the tropes control everything. And the birds, through Pisthetairos, control the tropes. Who, then, would not want wings? As it turns out later, every-

one does, and one schemer

after another

comes

to Pisthetairos

seeking to be winged. The last of the wing-wishing rascals is an informer, and to him Pisthetairos tells straight out the nature of the birds' power: “everyone can fly with words [pantes tots logois anapterountai ] (11. 1438—39). rhe verb anapetomai, which occurs a number of times in the scene with the informer, was used in the very first scene to describe how Pisthetairos and Euelpides

—and

“flew away from Athens on both feet.” Even irony elpides’ aneptomesth is surely ironic is subject to

—

the

Eulog-

omimesis that drives the play forward. By substituting logois for podoin, words for feet, Pisthetairos does not so much transform the figure as point to the force behind it, for it is only words that make figures possible. The topos is driven to atopia by the obvious paiadox of Pisthetairos s procedure, for the power (du-

namis) he finds in words is released by ignoring the significance = {dunamis “force, meaning”) of the figures he uses. The fiction-

fabulous structure of Cloudcuckooland is raised into place bv a dunamis adunate, an impossible power that is also a powerless power. al,

Pisthetairos

not consistent in his logomimesis. Why should he be? He does not always literalize his tropes, and when it suits him, as it does at the end of the scene with the informer, he can unexpectedly use a figure as a figure. Disgusted with the lack of success his rhetoric has had with the informer “I wanted to turn you, winging you with honest words, to lawful work [anapterosas boulomai chrestois logois trepsai pros ergon nomunon]" is

—

1448—49)

— he exchanges

(Korkurata ptera

(11.

his verbal

wings for Corcyraean wings

= “Corcyraean whip”) and scourges

the in-

former from the stage (11. 1461 ff.). This informer has been tieated to a most thorough lesson in the “vertiginous possibilities of

referential aberration

”

1

inherent

in rhetoric.

The

radical

suspension of logic that Pisthetairos engenders remains under his control, and he uses tropes however it pleases him. In practice, that is, he makes the decisions not only about what he says

1

A liefrories

of Reading

,

10.

)

The Rhetoric of Unreality but also about what lie things he says mean. His authority resides not so much in his ability to bring forth various tropes and topoi as in his absolute right to read himself. We do not know t

from one moment literal

to the next

or the figurative

Pisthetairos to

tell

us.

level

And he

whether we are dealing with the of language: we must wait for is

always ready to

tell

us,

ready

with readings that operate in the context of the lethetic fiction but whose atopia makes them ineligible for acceptance in the

world we

live in.

Though Tereus the Hoopoe claims credit for teaching the birds to speak, Pistehtairos was the one who brought them the real power of speech by showing the power of reading. The reason the birds did not recognize their rightful place of sovereignty was that they were “unlearned and not curious, and you haven't pored over Aesop [oud' Aisop on pepatekas ]” (1. 471).

The

interpretation of apologoi

is

obviously one of Pisthetairos’s

and by sharing his skill with the birds he brings them a gift as valuable as the one Prometheus gave mankind or more so. The contrast between Prometheus and Pisthetairos is made evident when the former appears near the end of the play to share some information and advice. We are made to realize that Prometheus’ gift of fire to men, valuable though it was, was as nothing compared with Pisthetairos’s gift to the birds. Promspecialties,

etheus received only trouble for his pains, but Pisthetairos is about to win away from Zeus sovereignty ( Basileia over the entire universe. Prometheus comes to make sure that, when the gods come to make terms, Pisthetairos insists upon having Basileia as his bride. He also announces that the barbarian gods, the Triballians, are pressuring Zeus to make peace with the birds. The existence of these barbarian gods surprises Pisthetairos, as it does us. “Are there actually some other gods, barbarians, above you?’’ he asks (11. 1525—26). And indeed, when the divine delegation arrives,

it

consists of Poseidon, Heracles,

barbarian Triballian god. Why, in this final dialogue scene

and

a

does Aristophanes contrive the appearance of a barbarian god of whose existence we had hitherto been unaware? Whitman does not try in the play,

perhaps feeling that those who do try may well bethe academies of Cloudcuckooland. Heinz Hofmann, in

to explain,

long in

/

75

I

he Lethetic Genre

Mythos und Komodie, his

monograph on

the Birds, resorts to the

principle of political representation: “With regard to the Triballian, his participation is motivated solely by the democratic principle, which accordingly presupposes the presence of bar-

barian gods on Olympus.

he spread of foreign

Athens all this, as they increased toward the century and engendered bitter enmity.” I

cults in

certainly played a role in

end of the

fifth

Hofmann argues

further that the references to the barbarians’ being above has nothing to do with superior position but refers only to their geographical location “up north” in Thrace, the source of such foreign cults. “The principal function of the riballian

god

therefore to exhibit the disadvantages of the democratic principle,” we are told, in that he affords a comic contrast to the other members of the delegation, whose soI

is

more traditional. 20 pronouncement is very learned and

ciopolitical roles are I

his

think an explanation of the

ingenious, but

I

presence can be found closer at hand, by considering the structure of the play rather than the religious history of Athens. In any case, the Aristophanes with whom we are familiar did not hesitate to satirize his enemies head-on: if he had wanted to express his displeasure with foreign cults or with the democratic principle, he would have been clear about it. At issue in the play is not the democratic principle but the power of speech, and in the final scene is diamatized the Olympians abdication of authority over language. Since the opening scene shows the birds as barbarians

and Pisthetairos

I

riballian’s

an unsuccessful reader, it is fitting that the closing scene should show the gods, whom the birds have supas

planted, as barbarians and Pisthetairos as a successful reader. I he play as a whole thus presents a symmetrical reversal of the roles of birds and gods, and the Triballian is a key figure in making that symmetry clear. Poseidon’s lament, “O democracy,

what

you bring us to, if the gods elect such a one!” (If 1570-71), is more an indictment of his fellow gods than of the will

democratic principle, for in electing the barbarian to be a member of the embassy, they have in effect given up. And in the -u

Mythos and Komodie: Untersuchungen zu den "Vogeln" desheim: Georg Olms, 1976), 133-34.

/

76

des Aristophanes (Hil-

”

The Rhetoric of Unreality

remainder of the scene Poseidon acquiesces to the “votes” of Heracles and the Triballian without much protest. The difficulty with these ballots among the ambassadors is not the principle but the incomprehensibility of the barbarian’s words.

The purpose action here

is

of

making the democratic

not to satirize

it

so

much

principle part of the

as to create a situation in

which the decision about the future of the universe is made in ef fect by an alogon, a dumb brute. The Triballian speaks “all but unintelligible Thracian” 21 or what Fitts calls “a murky language rather like that of Muta and Juva in Finnegans Wake.” 22 Much learning has gone into the deciphering of this gibberish, so much indeed that Whitman can claim that “the Triballian’s speech is clear enough except for 1615, nahaisatreu, and this has been most plausibly explained as ne Belsourdon, ‘Yes, by Zeus Campestris.’ 2:i Perhaps it is clear to linguistic scholars such as Joshua Whatmough (who offered the explanation given above), but it seems unlikely that it was intended to be clear to the audience.

It

certainly

is

not clear to the other characters,

One

who

tempted to agree with Fitts that “much needless ingenuity has been expended by Professors attempting to reduce it to sense,” 24 for to see it as “sense” would be a reduction of one of Aristophanes’ most brilliant jokes. Two preliminary ballots prepare for the ultimate confrontation between Pisthetairos and the delegation over the restoration of Basileia to the birds. In the first, Poseidon and Heracles agree that “the scepter” should be returned to the birds, the Triballian voting his nahaisatreu, which Pisthetairos (or Heracles the speech assignments in this scene are not agreed upon) interprets to mean assent. In the second, Heracles reiterates his vote and elicits saunaka haktarikrousa from the Triballian, which Heracles Poseidon goes along. Then insists means an affirmative. Pisthetairos, as if it were an afterthought, mentions the requireinterpret

it

in contradictory ways.

is

—

ment

that Basileia be given to

him

in

marriage. Poseidon,

who

reminding the reluctant, starving Heracles that giving up Basileia would be finds this condition nonnegotiable, prepares to leave,

21 Comic

Hero, 196. 22 Four Comedies, 250. 2i Comic Hero, 321, n. 90. 24 Four Comedies, 250.

/

77

fHE Lethetic Genre in effect disinheriting himself.

When

Pisthetairos answers with the precedent in Athenian law that a bastard— such as Hera-

cles—cannot votes against

inherit, Heracles votes to give it,

and

to the Triballian”

up

that, says Pisthetairos, ‘‘leaves

(1.

Poseidon everythin^ up

Basileia.

1677).

With supreme authority over the entire universe matter

to

is

intelligible

One word

didomi.

at stake, the

be decided by a barbarian who can say nothing more than kalani korauna kai rnegala basilmau ornito paraof this, the

last,

is

ordinary Greek, and

it

means

give back.” But the rest of the utterance (except for the kai) is not ordinary, not exactly Greek. It might mean ‘‘I give back the beautiful [kalani] and great [rnegala] lady Basileia [korauna Basilinau] to the birds [ornito]," or perhaps we should

lead

basilin

au

ornito

paradidomi that ,

is,

‘‘I

do not give Basileia

back to the birds.” Poseidon thinks it speaks not about Basileia but rather about badizein, “to depart,” and that the Triballian

is

recommending

that the delegation “depart like the swallows [badizein hosper hai chelidonesY (1- 1681). Here we have

unlimited ambiguity of normal language driven to extreme, such that the “confusion can only be cleared up by the intervention of an extra-textual intention. 25 The extratextual intention that prevails is provided by Pisthetairos: 26 “In that case he means ‘give her back to the swallows! [oukoun paradounai tais chelidosin legei ]” (1. possibilities for “referential aberration,” the

’

1682).

this interpretation

Though

perhaps the most farfetched of all, it prevails. Poseidon is overcome and gives in, the vote having gone two to one against him. I he issue is thus decided by the gods’ linguistic abdication, dramatized by means of the Triballian, and Pisthetairos’s linis

guistic aggressiveness, particularly his forceful

reading of his else’s speech. (We ought to note that the play’s final choricon, which directly follows this scene and introduces the exodos, wherein Pisthetairos’s apotheosis is made

own and everyone

manifest,

is

also centrally

concerned with the irresponsible aban-

donment of authority over language 25 Allegories

to “barbarians,” that

is,

to

of Reading, 10.

'"Some ‘

lhe P

editors, including Rogers, assign this speech to Heracles, but the logic makes p 'Sthetairos the more likely choice. ,y Whitman

apparently agrees.

/

78

[Comte Hero

1%)

The Rhetoric

and

sophists such as Gorgias

of Unreality

son Philip. Phis choricon, like the others and unlike the play as a whole, is satirical: but it descants on a theme treated lethetically in the previous scene.) Pisthetairos’s victory and subsequent elevation to godhood are the direct result of his and the birds' seizure of power over language. The “grand scheme” is shown to have been not so much the idea of transforming the birds’ polos into a polis as the principle, or dunamis, that underlies such transformations. The capitulation of the Olympians is shown finally to be the result of aphasia as much as hunger. The exodos is properly described as “the most astounding victory in Aristophanes, perhaps all comedy,” 27 perhaps, actually, in all of literature. It is also surely the most incredible. The fast-talking, punning old Athenian is transformed into a divinity whose splendor outshines sun and stars (1. 1709 ff.), and the final words of the play hail him as the “highest of gods [daimonon hupertatos]"

1765).

(1.

Here

rigorously consequential in

and attend

his

is

its

the ultimate lethetic

own

terms:

if

we choose

fantasy, to ignore

word, there is nothing to prevent our doing anything that language can do, and the best talker is the divinity. highest The apotheosis of rhetoric that Pisthetairos’s victory represents lies latent in every logomimetic the world

fiction. In the Birds

it

to the

is

made

dazzlingly manifest.

—

This apotheosis of rhetoric a rhetoric that is both persuasion and tropology at once is made possible by the lethetic mode but is undermined by it as well. T he power of language can only

—

become

a “reality”

when

reality

is

forgotten.

The

glorious victo-

and the birds, exhilarating and curiously movhas no relevance to the world in which we must

ry of Pisthetairos

ing though

make our

it is,

This is not a criticism of the play, of course, for the play assumes the unconnectedness of word and world as its very foundation. The power of speech is presented as a dunamis adunate, and that contradiction is the play’s “rhetorical moment,” that which generates the power of the fiction. Both power and powerlessness are essential features of language, and one increases in direct proportion with the other, so that the most powerful language conceivable is also inevitably the most lives.

27 Comic Hero,

196

.

/

79

Ihe Lethetic Genre “impossible,” the most persuasive speech the most outrageously figurative.

The reader

understand,

hope, that I do not intend to suggest that the Birds was meant as, or is only useful as, an object lesson in the philosophy of language. The play is surely one of literature’s clearest examples of a lethetic fantasy, and that designation means, among other things, that it is not interested in teaching anything. But part of its effectiveness as a lethetic fantasy arises

will

from the

fact that

I

rigorously logomimetic, that its subject matter is taken not from the world but from itself. It dramatizes the very assumptions that guide its composition, disit is

playing the absolute victory of the logomimetic imagination in the person of Pisthetairos. In the act of turning its attention away from the world and toward language, it finds nothing

more appropriate

speak about than the turning away from the world and toward language (that is, the construction of an atopia called Cloudcuckooland). I he play, mirroring the gesture of

to

makes itself powerful by reading itself. Any further reading, even and especially if it is a lethetic reading its

hero,

such as that offered here, will disclose the logomimesis. Only attempts at alethetic reading will miss the point, for in seeking the connection between the text and the world they will cover up or ignore the text’s central concern with the rhetoric of unreality.

/

80

Chapter

5

Incredible Joinings: Syllepsis in

Lewis Carroll,

Oscar Wilde, and Robert Nye

ticed

Structuralist poetic theory, especially as pracby Todorov and Genette, has focused on how narrative

structures function analogously to linguistic structures. In his

Grammaire du “Decameron ,” for example, Todorov undertakes to analyze the “syntax” of narrative and to show how elements in stories function like parts of speech in sentences. In the section of Figures III 2 called “Discours du recit,” Genette discusses features of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in terms of “voice” and “mood” directly comparable to the grammatical categories so named. T his is, of course, part of the structuralist program to found a poetics that would be a science of literature as linguistics is a science of language. The analogy between the structure of narrative and the structure of the sentence has been both provocative and productive but has never been was never intended to be more than an analogy in illustration of certain notions of literary structure. No claim was ever made that poetic content bore any such relation to linguistic structures. And yet there is reason to think that such a claim might be made. The discussion earlier of logomimesis, as well as the foregoing discussion of the Birds, has shown how fictional content 1

—

—

1

Grammaire du

- Figures

“ Decameron ”

(The Hague: Mouton,

1969).

III (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

/

81

The Lethe

i

ic

Genre

can indeed be derived from linguistic microstructures, particularly tropes, and that some kinds of poetic actions are nothing more than the logomimesis of the gestures effected by such tiopes. I want now to illustrate this notion further by showing how we can understand the origin of an important class of lethenc fictions as residing in a figure properly, if not entirely conventionally, designated by the classical term “syllepsis.”

Even tional

one wanted to use the term “syllepsis” in a convensense, one would have to be cautious. There are two curif

rently accepted

ways of understanding the term, both of them with fine classical pedigrees supporting their claims to legitimacy and neither in obvious contradiction to the other. 3 The Oxford English Dictionary gives both meanings in its definition: “A figure by which a word, or a particular form or inflexion of a word, is made to lefer to two or more other words in the same sentence, while properly applying to or agreeing with only one of them or applying to them in different senses. Cf. Zeugma .” In

•

•

•

.

.

.

other words, syllepsis might be either grammatical or semantic. An example of the first sort is George Puttenham’s line, “My Ladie laughs for joy, and I for woe,’ wherein “laughs” serves as predicate for both “Ladie” and “I,” in spite of the fact the the locution I laughs is ungrammatical. Syllepsis of the

ployed in Pope’s Rape of

Whether Or some

Or hC

stain

n Cpt ° f

C

the frail

the

Lock n,

nymph

shall

11.

second sort 105-109:

is

em-

break Diana’s law.

china-jar receive a flaw;

her honour or a new brocade,

has recent, y been 7 1,epsisamp,e in “ La le

taken

another direction by Poehque 40 L Mcno/ ^f, ir x? [1. 79J 496 501). For Riffaterre, the “mtertextual” syllepsis in which he is interested consiste a prendre un rnerne mot dans deux sens differents a la fois, sa signification contextuelle et sa signification intertextuelle. La signification contextuelle, cest le sens que demande la fonction du mot dans la phrase La |

o

rr

r re

(

S y'

’

in

se intertextuelle,”

,

signification intertextuelle, c’est

moms, (ju

ii

ui

viously,

un autre sens

possible (dans

le

dictionaire

c est a dire

du

dans l’abstrait), que le contexte elimine, ou negativise, parce est grammaticalement et semantiquement incompatible” (p. 496) Obthis type of syllepsis must be understood as a feature of every text

My

conception of syllepsis is much more limited, involving only that relatively small number of texts m which language “puts together” what we believe realitv keeps

apart. Ultimately, all l.terature texts are sylleptic in i

a

my

view.

is

sylleptic for Riffaterre.

Only certain

lethetic

should be clear that my notion of syllepsis and cries differ so widely that they can hardly even be said to disagree. They It

speak to entirely different concerns.

/

82

/ ncredible

Joinings

Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade; Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball. .

.

.

Here the literal (“stain brocade” and “lose necklace”) and figurative (“stain her honour” and “lose her heart”) uses of the verbs “stain” and “lose” confront each other in the double .

objects each

and

Plett )

4

is

given.

.

.

Some

.

.

.

authorities (for example, Lausberg

refer to this figure as “zeugma,” while others (for

example, Huntington Brown ) 5 warn against doing so. In this area of rhetorical terminology a certain amount of disagreement seems virtually permanent 6 For my purposes it is enough to note that there is a substantial weight of authority behind calling this figure, particularly in its semantic form, syllepsis. Syllepsis of this kind may be understood as making explicit the semantic duplicity of certain linguistic forms that unite concepts assumed to be separate “in reality” and at the same time, proposing equivalence between the two concepts thus set forth. It unmasks duplicity but, in the same gesture, asserts unity by accepting the authority of language in preference to that of “reality.” This acceptance may be ironic, as it surely is in the lines of Pope quoted above, but it is unreserved: the “nymph” (though not the poet describing her) is presented by the trope as one who would find no difference of consequence between staining her honor and staining her garment. The effectiveness of the trope depends on the confrontation of two incompatible semantic structures, one posited by language, the other by “reality” (that is, doxa, or common sense, or reason, or what have you). In Pope’s lines the confrontation corresponds to that between the values of the satirist, who stands with “reason,” and the object of his satire. Syllepsis of this kind is rightly considered, along with irony, to be one of the figures of thought for at stake are structures not just of language (as in the case of grammatical syllepsis) but of concepts. There is a close relation between semantic syllepsis and pun.

,

,

Lausberg, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik, 3d ed. (Munich: Max Heinrich F. Plett, Textwissenschaft und Textanalyse 1967); and (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1975). 5 See Brown’s article on syllepsis in the Princeton Encyclopedia oj Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Tor example, Jacques Dubois et al., Allgemeine Rhetonk (Munich: Quelle 8c Meyer, 1974), treat syllepsis as a purely grammatical figure. 4 Heinrich

Hueber,

/

83

he Leihetic Genre

I

ning, since puns also exploit semantic ambiguities. But the pun does not, as syllepsis always does, make the ambiguity into a confrontation. I he sentence “She was doing some filing” is am-

biguous, and

if

filing cabinets

pun. But

we imagine

holding a

a secretary sitting in front

nail file,

we can think of

it

as

of some

making

a

not a syllepsis until both meanings of “filing” are made specific, as in “She was filing her nails and my letters,” in which the locutionary structure itself implies that filing letters and filing nails are instances of the same activity. I should probably note in passing that such confrontations become even more

dramatic

it

is

semantic and grammatical syllepsis are combined, as in “The soldiers were filing their nails and past.” Even in such cases, however, it is the semantic and not the grammatical confrontation that takes precedence and that gives the trope its if

peculiar force.

That force arises

from the application of the reader’s (or listener’s) disbelief: if the reader of Pope believed that there was indeed no difference between staining one’s honor and staining a dress, the point of his witty lines would be lost. It is only because we do not believe in the equivalence of at least in

part

with filing papers that the trope works. We are confronted with two powerful structuring principles, our own belief filing nails

—

and our own language that which we assume to be true and that which we disbelieve but whose validity is vouched for powerfully by this linguistic “evidence.” Our pleasure in the trope arises from our recognition of the incompatibility of the two structuring principles, an incompatibility that we know to be

quite harmless because there

We do not obliged to discover “real” reasons why filing nails and filing papers might be the same. In other words, syllepsis is a figure is

no need

to resolve

it.

feel

that asks to be read lethetically.

he alethetic approach is not prevented— it never can be— but it is discouraged: it almost always proves to be more trouble than it is worth. What would be gained by discovering a nonlinguistic similarity between filing nails

and

his

filing

element

I

papers?

which makes syllepsis so especially interesting for my purposes, has been recognized by one of the earliest authorities to mention the trope. Herodian, writing in the second century after Christ, defines syllepsis as “the inclu1

of disbelief,

/ ncredible

sive reference of a predicate to a

compound

Joinings

where the

subject

predicate states a proposition t rue of only one part of he subject t

and untrue of the other part.” An example would be the line from Iliad 9.5, “The north wind and the west wind that blow from Thrace,” which is true only of the north wind. 7 This is obviously not what anyone today would call syllepsis, but shows us the antiquity of the notion that syllepsis is a “putting together” of the true and the untrue. Even though Herodian’s it

figure

ton

is

probably “of says, 8

Brown

disbelief,

about

little

but historical interest,” as Hunting-

remind us that the element of central to the development of thinking

serves to

it

of untruth,

is

this trope.

We

prominently employed in texts that themselves solicit disbelief, and our expectation is not disappointed. One of our most prominent writers of incredible fictions, Lewis Carroll, is also one of the great practitioners of syllepsis. The refrain that runs throughout “The Hunting of the Snark” offers several examples:

might expect

to find syllepsis

They sought

it

with thimbles, they sought

it

with care;

They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share; They charmed with smiles and soap. it

Some

rhetoricians might argue that there are really not several

syllepses here but only one. All

hope” used first

is

in

would agree

that “with forks

where

a semantic syllepsis as defined above,

two different senses with respect

sense, “by

terized by”).

means

to

its

The phrase

“with’’

two objects

of’; in the second, “in a

manner

“with smiles and soap”

is

and

(in

is

the

charac-

ambiguous

and could be read as meaning “They charmed it using smiles and soap” or “They charmed it using soap while smiling.” Technically speaking, the first reading would involve no syllepsis, since “with” would be understood to mean “by means of” in both cases. Technically speaking once again, there is no syllepsis at all in “They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care” since, 7 S.v.

“Syllepsis,” Princeton Encyclopedia oj Poetry

8 Ibid.

and

Poetics.

The Lethetic Genre though “with

used

two different senses, the word is used twice, not once. There is parallelism but no syllepsis. Carroll s verse gallops blithely and wittily over all such technical distinctions. An initial “naive” reading of the quatrain does not find any difference in effect between the “genuine” syllepsis, with forks and hope,” and the nonsyllepsis, “with thimbles

.

.

.

is

with care,”

issue in syllepsis

is

precise locutionary

in

and

for very

good reason. Since the

a confrontation of

form

in

real

two semantic systems, the

which that confrontation

is presentnot important. Syllepsis is a figure of thought, not of grammar or syntax. As long as the reader/listener perceives a situation in which the linguistic system puts together that which he or she believes is “really” separate and distinct, he or she will experience what we might call a “sylleptic” effect.

ed

is

o approach this point in another way, let us suppose that Oscar Wilde, not Alexander Pope, had written the line about I

staining

honor and

We

might have heard a character in one of his plays exclaim, “After my rendezvous with Jack I feared that my dress was stained. T o my relief it was merely my honor.” From the point of view of traditional rhetoric, there is no syllepsis at all here, since we do not have “a word made to refer to two other words in the same sentence.” But the joke works just as well in this version as in Pope’s because the dresses.

.

.

.

same

confrontation

staged between the same two semantic structures, though that confrontation is provoked in a slightly different way by this particular verbal form. I

am

is

pioposing

that, just as irony

is

a figure of

thought that

does not depend on a specific verbal formulation to achieve its ironic effect, so is syllepsis a figure of thought capable of achieving sylleptic effect by several alternative locutionary strategies. I he relation between syllepsis and irony is even deeper, for both iel\ on a sti ucture of expectation (belief) against which the trope works and without which it would fail altogether. But unlike

which forces the reader to reinterpret the utterance before him in such a way as to bring it into conformity with his

irony,

(He says Beautiful weather,” but I know it’s snowing, so he must really mean “Terrible weather”), syllepsis allows each semantic structure to go its own way. This statement means belief

nothing more than that irony /

86

is

alethetic, syllepsis lethetic.

I ncredible

j oinings

he ironic mode, as we all know, characterizes a large number of the alethetic fictions of our tradition, and an author’s entire oeuvre can be dominated by this one mode. One thinks of Thomas Mann in this connection almost at once. Another, far smaller, class of fictions, lethetic fictions in this case, could properly be called sylleptic. But before examining some examples of sylleptic fiction, should first indicate how a narrative as opposed to a specific phrase might properly be described as inI

—

I

—

volving syllepsis.

Here again Lewis Carroll provides the most instructive example. Here is the last stanza of the “Gardener’s Song” from Sylvie and Bruno:

He

thought he saw an Argument That proved he was the Pope: He looked again, and found it was A Bar of Mottled Soap. “A fact so dread,” he faintly said, “Extinguishes all hope!”

All nine stanzas follow the

[X]

A

/

That

same

[did something]:

/

pattern:

He

“He thought he saw an

looked again and found

it

was

quoting the character’s reaction].” He thinks he sees an elephant, but it turns out to be a letter; a supposed banker’s clerk is revealed to be a hippopotamus; and so on. The last stanza is especially interesting because the mistake involves a special sort of confusion. To “see” an argument is a very different matter from “seeing” a bar of soap, for in the first case “see” does not mean “to perceive with the eye” but “to grasp, understand, intuit.” It is troublesome enough, of course, to mistake a postage stamp for an albatross, but at least these two items are both concrete objects. To mistake such a concrete object for an abstraction such as an argument is far worse. It is the last straw. It extinguishes all hope. Carroll’s poem works its way to a climax that is an alternative formulation of the syllepsis “He saw an argument and a bar of soap.” But the spirit of this syllepsis pervades the entire work, in which the poet “takes seriously” the equation proposed by the trope between the literal and metaphorical meanings of “to see.” /

[Y].

[Two

lines

/

87

The Lethetic Genre

One

arguments and objects, then one could mistake the one for the other; and if this kind of mistake is possible, it follows that all sorts of other, equally outrageous and disquieting mistakes are likely. Syllepsis is a “putting together," and once things are put together, it becomes difficult to tell them apart. Carroll’s poem is completely and rigorously sylleptic in its point of view, driving the topos of “seeing an argument” to the atopia If

“sees" both

of mistaking almost

anything for almost anything else. Though the poem in fact ends with the verse that gives the clue to the locution that forms the basis for the logomimesis, the nonsense universe based upon it is already fully set up when the poem opens.

This

wonderfully amusing to us, of course. It is no skin off the reader’s nose if the absolute rule of a particular trope has such distressing consequences, because the reader does not believe it. His universe is not ordered on such principles, and he is prepared to live by his belief that seeing arguments and seeing soap are two different sorts of actions. I he poor character, howis all

who is stuck about. One of the

poem, has nothing to be amused great comic strokes of the poem is that the hero, characterized throughout as close to despair, succumbs in

ever,

inside the

the end; within the confines of the atopia he inhabits, he has

indeed nothing to hope for. This syllepsis is not just a verbal quirk for him; it is the fundamental law of nature for him. For us it is an occasion for high mirth, thanks to our disbelief. I he Gardener s Song is sylleptic, then, not only or even

—

primarily because

can be shown

develop from a figure that traditional rhetoric would call syllepsis but chiefly because its narrative operates sylleptically by “putting together” that which only language can put together. Since syllepsis is a figure of thought, the confrontation between language proposing sameness where belief would insist upon difference, that thought alone is enough to demonstrate the working of the figure. No it

to

form makes Buddenbrooks ironic, and in the same way no special verbal pattern makes Carroll’s poem particular locutionary

The poem

sylleptic.

plays with the idea of “seeing,” taking seriously the semantic unity proposed by the same word being

used lor two different things (perceiving and understanding). Because this unity flies in the face of our belief, the narrative based on it is also incredible. /

88

/ incredible

A

J oinings

based on the assumption of certain unifications that we believe only language can produce, but it need not either explicitly provide a typical rhetorical syllepsis or specify the unifications at issue as long as the results of such a “putting together” are dramatized. Oscar Wilde, for example, never gives us a line like “He was Earnest in name and by nature." He does, both in the first act and at the final curtain of The Importance of Being Earnest, explicitly connect the notions of having a certain name and being of a certain nature. More important, his play sets forth an atopia in which verbal labels readily replace “genuine” characteristics and in which the characters are perfectly willing to accept such replacement. We do not find examples of traditional rhetorical syllepsis on every page of the play; indeed we have a hard time finding any at all; but for all that, the play is sylleptic, and indeed also lethetic, to its very core. Earnest is in fact a superb example of a lethetic fiction. It is a sylleptic narrative

is

our attention upon itself and allows forget the world we accept as the “real” one without mak-

literary structure that rivets

us to

ing the least pretense to asserting trary,

actively solicits

it

will see,

by having

own

On

“reality.”

the con-

our disbelief not only by aggressively

using fantastic coincidences to

we

its

its

tie

the plot together but also, as

characters readily accept signifiers in

place of signifieds (for example, the words “Certainly, ’

mamma”

of actual compliance and so forth). T here is nothing supernatural in the play, but it is incredible all the same. It may therefore serve to highlight the distinction made earlier between lethetic texts and either fantastic or marvelous ones, as Todorov defines them. There is nothing supernatural about Gwendolyn’s fixation upon the forms of language, but it is incredible nonetheless that she would drop Jack in an instant if his name turned out not to be Ernest. It is quite on a par with the incredulity elicited by Carroll’s “Gardener’s Song”: w^ do not believe that people easily mistake bars of soap for arguments, though there is nothing supernatural about such mistakes. T he energy that drives the plot forward is generated to no small degree by Gwendolyn’s infatuation with the name of Ernest, a name that Jack just happens to have assumed. “My ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest,” she confesses, going on to explain that “there is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence” and that it is "the only in place

/

89

The Lethetic Genre name”

really safe

61— 62). 9 Gwendolyn

not so naive as to believe that a man might actually be earnest, but of course if such a man existed one might properly say that he would inspire absolute confidence. Being a modern and sophisticated girl, (pp.

is

Gwendolyn has given up such hopes. She has replaced them, however, with an “ideal” based entirely upon the verbal tag “Ernest and has transferred to it all the confidence that one would properly owe to the characteristic. This is an entirely unexpected, indeed incredible, strategy, but

than simply foolish because

it

is

entertaining rather

has the untrustworthy but potent

authority of language behind it. that the quality of earnestness Ernest, but the fact that

it

The audience does is

not believe

replaceable by the

name of

Gwendolyn

accepts such replacement is given a comprehensible (though not credible) motivation. Gwendolyn has replaced all faith in human qualities by faith in verbal surfaces. Intentions

are irrelevant.

When

Jack/Ernest attempts to propose marriage to her, she insists on his making the explicit verbal gesture, even though she already knows both his intentions and her own: Gwendolyn.

adore you. But you haven’t proposed to me yet. Nothing has been said at all about marriage. The subject has not even been touched. Well

I

may

propose to you now? Gwendolyn. I think it would be an admirable opportunity. And to spare you any possible disappointment, Mr. Worthing, think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully deter-

Jack.

.

.

.

I

1

mined to accept you. Jack. Gwendolyn! Gwendolyn. \

Mr. Worthing, what have you got to say to me? Jack. You know what I have got to say to you. (twendolyn. Yes, but you don’t say it. Jack.

es,

Gwendolyn,

Gwendolyn.

will

Of course

you marry me? I

will darling.

How

il!

long you have been about [Pp.

62-63]

When

she later proclaims to Cecily that “in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing” (p. 14), she is 1

he Plays of Oscar Wdde (New York: the text refer to this edition. 'I

/

90

Modern

Library, n.d.). Citations below in

— I ncredible

J oinings

speaking of one of her own must fundamental principles. She is, in style, a model of filial obedience: when her mother tells her to come with her into the next room, she replies, “Certainly, mamma," in the most courteous fashion (p. 60). That this acquiescence to her mother’s wishes is purely verbal, that Gwendolyn in fact remains right where she is, is in perfect conformity to this principle.

Gwendolyn, then, thing

is

dead earnest about one thing, and that the verbal surface. She may have “the gravest doubts” is

of why he has deceived her, but “I intend to crush them.” In the next breath she is ready to say that this explanation “seems to me to have the stamp of truth upon it" (p. 14). She is able to manage the conventional verbal surface quite independently of the real state of affairs in the world, and if the required verbal convention

about the credibility of

Jack’s explanation

1

directly contradicts her

things really are, to tell Jack,

it

I

notions of the way

bothers her not a whit. She

without the

not too long,

own commonsense

will wait

least trace

is

therefore able

of embarrassment, “If you are

here for you

all

my

life."

She knows that

romantic young lady is supposed to tell her beloved that, if he must leave, she is prepared to “wait for him all her life." She also knows that in practice such an idea is absurd, that the sentiment can only be validated, as it were, by never having to be put into practice. Just as she prompts Jack earlier to the proper performance of his verbal duties in proposing, she prompts him here to his duty in not holding her to her (conventional and insincere) word. She thereby acknowledges her insincerity, but that acknowledgment is not bothersome to her or to anyone else because insincerity is taken for granted. Or, to state the matter in another way, Gwendolyn is always sincere whether she means it or not. Gwendolyn is not unique among the play’s characters in these qualities. Over and over again we find that the persons of Wilde’s comedy are more earnest about language than they are about anything else. The logomimesis indicated by the title is doubled, for not only does the action turn upon the sylleptic equation of names and qualities, but earnestness proves to he a a properly

important issue after all. Everybody participates in the rigorous game of taking speech seriously. Even Lane, the man-

crucially

servant, takes part:

a

he Lethetic Genre

I

Algernon.

I

hope tomorrow

will

be a fine day, Lane.

never is, sir. Algernon. Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist. Lane.

It

Lane.

I

do my

best to give satisfaction,

sir.

And poor Canon Chasuble

finds that living in world of such

serious folk requires caution.

One may

not speak metaphorically and say, “Were I fortunate enough to be Miss Prism’s pupil, 1 would hang upon her lips,” without eliciting glares of disapproval. I he use of metaphor is a risky business for everyone in the play, particaulrly in the vicinity of a literal

reader as one could hope to

Lady Bracknell, as earnest find. When Algernon con-

fesses inadvertently that his fictional friend

Bunbury “was

quite

exploded,” she wonders if he was “the victim of a revolutionary outrage” (p. 1 17). Such glib acceptance of the face value of lan-

guage

also responsible for

her reaction to the circumstances of Jack’s birth. First of all, when Jack says that he has “lost” both parents, her reply (“ 1 hat seems like carelessness ) addresses the is

foi

m and

on

to relate that

not the meaning of his statement.

I

hen,

when he goes

he knows nothing about the circumstances of his bir th and knows only that he was “found’ in a handbag in a cloakroom at Victoria Station, Lady Bracknell makes the substitution of

“found” for “born” the

basis for a trope that she, at

“You can hardly imagine that and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter girl brought up with the utmost care to marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel?’ (p. 68). She keeps to least,

takes quite seriously:

I

—

—

throughout the play, reminding everyone later on that until yesterday I had no idea that there were any families or persons whose origin was a Terminus” (p. 18). She had asked about Jack s parents and had been told about handbags and this line

1

railway stations, cially, I

and

that substitution

is

linguistically, if not so-

quite acceptable to her.

he preference for

linguistic

forms over meaning, intention,

marked in Lady Bracknell as in her daughter. Only language makes it possible for a man to be descended from a handbag, and only language makes it possible for a woman, oi

leality

is

as

Lady Dumbleton, at

the age of forty,

/

92

have been “thirty-five ever since she arrived which was many years ago now” (p. 123). In

to

/ incredible

Joinings

form has social consequences quite independent of reality. Everyone knows that Lady Dumbleton is not thirty-five, but her saying that she is creates a linguistic and social fact that has far greater importance for Lady Bracknell, her daughter, and indeed the other characters in the play than

either case, the verbal

the importance of being genuine, sincere, “earnest.”

It

was nec-

essary for the Snark hunters to say something three times to

make

it

even

if

once

true, but for Wilde’s characters,

that

still

does not quite make

And

matter? Truth

is

tance at

had better find

all,

it

irrelevant.

a

it

truth

if

way

to

is

enough

—and

what does it have any impor-

“true,” is

to

conform

to language.

keeps scurrying in efforts to let the “truth” somehow conform to someone’s text. The master text is of course the name “Ernest” itself, which we learn later not only Gwendolyn but Cecily as well is prepared to insist upon. Cecily in her own way has gone further than her counterpart, for she has actually produced a text, in the form of her diary, to which Algy discovers he conforms by happy accident or at least gives the appearance of conforming by announcing himself as Jack’s ne'er-do-well brother Ernest. Like Gwendolyn, Cecily has a particular attachment to this name (“It had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest” [p. 96]) and has spun out a completely documented fantasy based upon it. When Algernon/Ernest confesses his love for Cecily and asks her to marry him, she replies with the unexpected information that they have already been engaged for the last three months: Earnest

'

s

plot

—

—

Algernon. But

how

did

we become engaged?

Well, ever since dear Uncle Jack

Cecily.

first

confessed to us that he

younger brother who was very wicked and had, you of course have formed the chief topic of conversation between myself and Miss Prism. And of course a man who is much talked about is always attractive. One feels there must he something in him after daresay it was foolish of me, hut fell in love with you, Ernest. all. [Pp. 94-95] had

a

I

I

Cecily has fallen in love, as she readily admits, with a “topic of

conversation” rather than with any actual person, but the under-

/

93

6

5

The Lethetic Genre lying syllepsis that

makes the

plot (im)possible sanctions the sub-

stitution of discourse for ‘‘reality.' Cecily quite prefers the text

she has written

her diary to the life she has been actually leading, and now she finds herself in the happy position of being able to insist that “reality” (in the form of Algernon) shape itself to fit. For Cecily, then, Algernon’s function is to “be” the Ernest of her book. 1 he syllepsis of person and history touched upon here is a in

one might expect, of logomimetic literature. homas Mann plays on the notion in the last volume of his Joseph tetralogy, where even Joseph himself has trouble at times distinguishing the life he is leading from the narrative that life is shaping. But the most extreme atopia to come out of this topic is, favorite topic, as I

think,

I

the

little

of Hans

story

10

Daiber called “Es steht hero of Daiber’s tale, Karl

geschrieben” (“It Is Written”). The Koi nemann, arrives in town to take a new job, happens past a

bookshop window, looks in, and finds to his surprise a volume with his picture on the cover. It is a photo of him as he is at that moment, and when he adjusts his tie, the tie in the picture is adjusted as well. Karl buys a copy of this book and opens it to find the very words that begin the story “Es steht geschrieben.” He closes the book in confusion, then reopens it to read that he was reading. He is horrified. He tries to get rid of the book, finally throwing it into a pond in the park. But as the book sinks to the bottom, Karl finds himself suddenly unable to breathe, and he falls unconscious as he attempts to retrieve the volume from the water. A park attendant takes him to the hospital.

He

recovers quickly. “After the medical examination he went up to a bookcase, threw the medical books out, and climbed onto the highest shelf’ (p. 16). The story ends with this complete oblitera-

between man and book. Daiber intends nothing more by this than

tion of distinction

verbal entertainment, but

it

is

to

interesting to see

provide a

how

little

the story

develops out of a change in the relationship of control between man and book. At first, Karl appears to be in charge of the situation, to actually

write

his

book, as the book changes

"’In the collection Argumente fur Lazarus 1

—

1

.

in

(Munich: Langen/Muller, 1966),

/ ncredible

J oinings

response to what he does. After he starts to read his story, however, the book begins to take control, so that what the book does to “drown,” for example becomes inscribed in the living experience of the hero. He ceases to “write” and can only “read.” At the end of the story, the only action that the man can initiate is the attempt to “be” his book. In the story of Cecily and her Ernest, however, Cecily remains fully in charge of the writing process, so that her text remains in conformity with the greater text of an archetypal romantic love story. Cecily manages her fantasy love affair so that it proceeds just as it “ought,” with the required temporary breakup to demonstrate its earnestness: “It would hardly have been a really serious engagement if it hadn’t been broken off at least once” (p. 96). Here again, the pure verbal surface of “earnestness” is accepted as the

—

—

substitute for the

genuine

article.

Algernon’s only role in this, his own love story, is to make sure that he adheres to the script. He may not change the name of the hero, for instance, from “Ernest” to “Algernon” without toppling the entire structure. Algernon has in fact blundered into the leading role in Cecily’s drama by his ruse, but he finds that he likes the role and wants to keep it. So he, like Jack, finds himself suddenly taken with the urgent desire to become christened with the name of Ernest. Jack and Algy want to write themselves into the fantasy constructed by Gwendolyn and Cecily, just as everyone in Athens wants to take part in Pisthetairos’s rhetorical triumph by becoming birds. The importance of being Ernest in Wilde’s play is directly comparable to the importance of being a bird in Aristophanes’s, because in both cases it is a matter of submitting to an uncompromising linguistic authority. In Wilde’s play the source of this linguistic power seems at times to be primarily erotic the sexual attractiveness Aristophanes makes two young ladies while of the

—

—

Pisthetairos’s sexual rejuvenation

dominance. But even

in Earnest

consequent it

is

to his rhetorical

the powerless

power of

makes the whole mechanism go. The allure of the girls and the social pretensions of Lady Bracknell are not in themselves adequate motivation for the syllepsis on which the rhetoric that

play builds.

Indeed one

is

not sure

how

attractive the girls

would be for /

95

he Lethetic Genre

I

Jack and Algernon -if they were not so rhetorically determined. Jack calls Gwendolyn “a sensible, intellectual girl” in the most admiring sort of way, though the only demonstration of her intellect we have seen is her insistence on the priority of verbal forms. He also describes Cecily as “not a silly, romantic girl, I am glad to say. She has a capital appetite, goes for long walks, and pays no attention at all to her lessons” (p. 71). If we wonder how it is that paying no attention to one’s lessons constitutes proof that

one

not

we

our question answered later by When Miss Prism prods her to the “intellectual pleasures” of German grammar, Cecily complains, “But I don’t like German. It isn’t at all a becoming language. I know perfectly is

silly,

find

Cecily herself.

well that

Cecily

look quite plain after my German lesson” (p. 76). concern with the effect that the sound of German might

s

I

have on her

echoed

Miss Prism’s worry that the chapter in her political economy book on the subject of the “fall of the rupee” would be “somewhat too sensational” for a young lady. Miss Prism is evidently thinking sylleptically, substituting a literal foi a metaphorical meaning of “fall’’ and fearing the effects of such language upon the tender soul of her pupil. Ignoring the matter of the rupee s “fall” is for Miss Prism a way of preserving Cecily s innocence, and ignoring her German lessons is for Cecily a way of preserving her sexual attractiveness. In both cases it is a matter of avoiding the destructive power of language. is

in

he power that Cecily fears in German grammar is the same power that she and the rest of the play’s characters bow to throughout the comedy: the authority of the naked signifier, the Pure verbal surface. Lady Bracknell has already given I

nation of

how

the expla-

this

power works

in the field

of foreign languages: I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh, which is worse. But German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed, f

rench songs

I

(p. 60).

believe

it

is

What Lady Bracknell approves of about German,

respectable “sound,”

so” its

of course just what Cecily cannot tolerate. 1 o sound respectable, whether one is so or not, is not likely to enhance the attractiveness of a young lady. In Cecilv’s system of values, attractiveness is explicitly connected with the appearance of being “wicked and bad.” The other young people /

96

is

I n credible

Joinings

hold similar views, even Jack, the most “serious” of all of them. He is embarrassed “to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position,

and

of the kind”

I

am

really quite

And

inexperienced in doing anything

“Gwendolyn, it is a terrible thing for a man to ind out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?” But of course it is really only the verbal form of wickedness, not wicked(p.

107).

later:

f

ness

itself,

that

Gwendolyn,

is

valued.

and the

devoted to the verbal surface that they are so well able to manage. But what makes it manageable is that is has no fixed connection to the nonlinguistic world save through accident. Language that is not simply a string of signifiers to play with would be dangerous, shocking, and improper. Lady Bracknell makes this point in one of the few examples of rhetorical syllepsis in the play. She expresses her displeasure at hearing the sounds of an argument: “1 dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often conCecily,

vincing” (p. 128).

arguments

(that

It is,

is

rest are

easy to see

why she would

dislike vulgar

altercations), but only reflection

upon

the

which these characters live gives a clue as to why she should also dislike convincing arguments (in this case, “courses of reasoning”). Convincing and credible language would tear down the foundation of Lady Bracknell’s world, and she is candid enough to admit it. This, after all, is a world in which smoking counts as an “occupation” (p. 65) and hair may be described as curling “naturally with a little help from others” (p. 96). Convincing arguments could be only a threat to inhabitants of such a world, which is after all not so distant from that world of Lewis Carroll’s Gardener, in which arguments may become indistinguishable from bars of soap. basis for the atopia in

.

.

.

Wilde’s play uses syllepsis as a basic strategy

in

exploring the

“being Earnest.” It would be foolish to deny, of course, that there is a powerful element of irony at work here as well or that the play’s success depends upon our willingness to acknowledge the importance of not being earnest. But this ironic element returns us to the issue of very topic

announced

in the title:

lethetic reading, for lethetic literature,

above

all,

reminds us

of

the importance, at times, of forsaking the serious. Wilde’s irony is

not spurring us to ever-more-complex hermeneutic strategies

/

97

The Lethetic Genre hopes of finding “the truth” behind

in the

apparent nonsense; it insists, rather, that this really is nonsense. But it became nonsense by being very “earnest”— not about the world we live in, to be sure, but about the language we use. The characters in the play do precisely what we in the audience must not do if we are to enjoy the performance: they accept the word as a per-

good

fectly

of view that underlies

sylleptic point

not share

1

he

ingly tives,

They

substitute for the world.

this

believe.

this atopia

We enjoy

the

because we do

it.

upon which

founded is, for all its seemlimitless mirth, severely limited. Like most sylleptic narrait is prepared to accept only one kind of incredible linguissyllepsis

Earnest

is

unification, in this case the substitution of signifiers for their signifieds. Actually, most of the syllepses of fantasy are even tic

more

specific than this.

We

are familiar, for example, with stories about werewolves, vampires, and similar creatures that man-

age to be both

and dead

human and

at the

same

time.

animal

at the

same

time, or both alive

hough one cannot

point to a particular sylleptic locution as the origin of such tales, they are genuinely (if often rather simplemindedly) sylleptic because they posit as unified fiction

I

what we believe

makes use

of

all

to

be

in reality separate.

sorts of sylleptic premises:

Science

one of the

more frequent among them proposes the unification of man and machine, either by the anthropomorphization of the mechanical (robots) or by the mechanization of persons (cyborgs). Another favorite syllepsis plays on the idea of being “in two places at once” by having a character live quite literally “in another world” while at the same time inhabiting this one. A variation

on

this

theme has the character

back and forth between two time periods so easily that the boundary between them seems to vanish. A prize-winning story a number of years ago, Richard McKenna’s “ I he Secret Place,” joins these two ideas: the secret place in which the heroine spends much of her time turns out to be not another world at all but this world in the far distant past.

11

"Anthologized

in Aldiss

(New York. Pocket Books,

/

98

slip

and Harrison,

Nebula Award Stones Number Two 1967). (.itations below in the text refer to this edition. eds.,

Incredible / oinings

What makes McKenna’s the syllepsis of “this world

story particularly interesting

that

is

other world” operates structurally as well as thematically. The real action of the tale concerns not the adventures of the heroine in her Miocene wonderland but rather the narrator’s discovery of what Helen’s secret place “really”

really

The

is.

/

who participates in the marvelous adventure know how deeply marvelous is; only the narra-

girl

does not

tor, a scientist

it

engaged

mapping,

in geological

is

able to disclose

wonder. Helen, the narrator's secretary, explains to him how she and her brother used to play fairy-tale games in the desert. She eventually goes so far as to let him participate in her fantasies, to run with her in the make-believe forests and across imaginary streams. “I played Helen’s game, but never lost sight of my own [i.e., geological map making]. Every night I sketched in on my map whatever I had learned that day of the fairyland topography. Its geomorphology was remarkably consistent” (p. 8). Later on, as the scientific project on which the narrator is working draws to a close, the information is combined in the form of geohistorical maps that he is given to examine. “But when I came to the bottom map, of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape, the hair on my neck stood up. / had made that map myself. It was Helens fairyland. The topography was point by point the same" (p. 13). The syllepsis of this world and the other world in which Helen has lived comfortably for so long now engulfs the narrator and threatens to overcome him. Science and scientific methods have led directly into the land of atopia. A point of view predicated upon credibility has produced evidence of the its

I

incredible.

This

syllepsis

of science and the occult

—a technique,

by the

way, that has a tradition in science fiction long predating McKenna occasions a conflict that the scientist is not able to resolve. The narrator marries Helen, but he makes a career of

—

denying what Helen represents. graying a will

find

bit at

the temples.

anywhere

I

am

“I

am

as positivistic a scientist

in the Mississippi

now, as you

a professor myself

drainage basin.

When

I

tell

seminar student ‘That assertion is operationally meaningless,’ I can make it sound downright obscene. The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game, and it’s only safe if it’s kept pure” (p. 15). But this a

/

99

2

The Lethetic Genre rigorous separation of safe, pure science from Helen’s wonderland is constantly threatened and not only because the story has shown how the scientific method might produce evidence of the incredible.

Helen and the narrator have a son, the

living syllepsis

of science (the narrator) and the occult (Helen). In spite of every effort, the boy, Owen, will not allow his maternal heritage to be repressed: “He learned to read on the modern sane and sterile children’s books. We haven’t a fairy tale in the house but I have

—

a science library.

And Owen makes

fairy tales out of science” (p.

15).

McKenna’s

story, then,

narrative structure.

makes the

does so

sylleptic process part

of

its

way, of course, a way that would be familiar to readers of Lovecraft and other, earlier fantasy writers; but it does it all the same with considerable art. It

in a limited

But this sylleptic narrative process need not be as clearly bounded as it is in “ I he Secret Place and in most fantasy and science or as it is in The Importance of Being Earnest. There are no inherent limitations on the ability of language to put together fiction

what

keeps apart. Language is capable of finding ways to unite everything with everything else. This fact is hardly news, either to linguists or to literary critics, but it shows the “reality”

potential for limitless verbal play in the sylleptic strategy. And one recent novel goes far toward exploiting this very idea of

unlimited syllepsis: Robert Nye’s Merlin. Curiously enough, Nye’s novel really belongs in the tradition of Oscar Wilde, though on first glance there is little about Merlin that would remind one of the verbal pyrotechnics of Earnest. he connection is more indirect, mediated by the implacable idiosyncrasy of Ronald Firbank. Nye acknowledges his book’s debt to Firbank by dedicating the volume to his (and Gertrude I

and

homas Malory’s) memory. Readers may be more familiar with Stein and Malory than with Firbank, whose eccentric novels (for example, Valmouth 1919, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli 1926) are deliberately artificial and fantastic and not to everyone’s taste. Firbank’s artifice and fragile brilliance places him directly in the tradition of Wilde, as Charles Osborne has noted. 12 He shares with Wilde, and with Stein

s

I

,

,

—

1

P enguin Companion

/

100

to

English Literature

(

New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 183.

/ ncredible

Gertrude

J Dinings

an interest in the manipulation of language without much regard for serious meaning, a love for elaborate and unconventional verbal structures that are not really about Stein,

anything. By his dedication,

Nye

is

placing Merlin within this

nothing more than a verbal castle in the air, an Arthurian Cloudcuckooland that is serious only about the capacity of language to make everything seem a transformation of something else. Because Merlin is a magician that is, one who effects transformations his story is to a considerable degree the story of endless metamorphoses and of Merlin’s capacity for effecting and participating in them. But it is also the story of the way in which Merlin was himself changed into a story, and it is for this reason akin to a large-scale version of Daiber’s “It Is Written.’’ Its larger scale, however, and the background of events and characters familiar to us from Malory do not make Nye’s tale any more credible than Daiber’s. The larger scale serves in fact as Nye’s opportunity to pile one fantasy on top of the last, to interweave so many strains of myth that the reader is forced to recognize early in his reading that an elaborate game is being set up. First of all, the novel begins in a very un-Arthurian fashion with a ribald version of the harrowing of hell, in which Christ appears as a dancing girl attended by an ape. The girl makes the devil drunk and leads the dead souls out of hell while Satan lies in a stupor on the infernal floor. Upon awakening, Lucifer decides to retaliate by producing an Antichrist. He will beget upon the body of a virgin of his choice a virgin rather more ripe than the other Virgin is reported to have been his own son, Merlin. This new addition is not designed to bolster the credibility of material of which its first publisher, Caxton, was more than a little suspicious. Nye is waving good-bye to credibility and is releasing his readers, as early in the narration as he possibly can, from the burden of alethetic reading. Those who like to look for religious allegory, for examallegory in the Arthurian legends will find themselves frustrated by the author’s strategy of ple making almost every conceivable allegory part of the fantasy. Whether we are looking for religion, philosophy, alchemy, or even literary criticism, all of it is here, surfeit of it, included in the explicit verbal surface. We are not allowed to look for Christradition.

It is,

1

think, an apt gesture, for Merlin

—

—

—

—

is

—

—

/

101

The Lethetic Genre tian

for

parallels,

example, because Christian parallels are

thrown in our faces in profusion. Our efforts to discover the meaning behind the text are countered by the promiscuous semiosis in which it engages. It cannot mean something as long as it seems to mean everything. he desire for impossible unions, both sexual and semiotic, impels the plot of Merlin. If we were to try to find the rhetorical basis for Nye’s fantasy, the topos from which his atopia is engendered, the most likely candidate would have to be the phrase the sword in the stone.” This is not a rhetorical syllepsis in the strict sense, of course, but it is, as an image, as sylleptic as could I

be.

We

do not

believe that real swords will go into real stones,

though the powerless power of language can make a wink. Nye’s novel

is

it

happen

in

a great conjurer’s trick of putting the

sword into the stone (putting impossible things together) over and over again. As Merlin observes about the story of his life, the same event goes on happening.’ And at the beginning of that story, during the act of conceiving Merlin, the devil remarks, apropos of nothing, ‘“All the same, my dears ‘All the same what? demands my uncle Beelzebub, crowned head of 1

.

the diptera. ‘All the same,’ says

.

my

father” (p. 16). And in one way or another everything in the world of the book does prove the same. But since everything is different at the outset, no little effort is involved in making it the same,

and

even after great expenditure of labor some of the difference lemains. Lucifer wants his union with the virgin Vivien to the “the same” as that of the Holy Spirit with the Virgin Mary, but he also wants it to be the opposite. As it happens, since the baby Merlin is baptized at his birth by Sister Mary Contradiction, the man Merlin becomes a genuine syllepsis of heaven and hell. He is both the son of God and the son of Satan, both Christ and

He

Lucifer.

That 1

his

is

his

is

a living affront to the law of noncontradiction.

charm.

he charm of Merlin, which he works upon

own

history,

is

Merlin

(

I

/

same syllepsis upon everything over and over again, making great

it

oronto: Bantam, 1981), 175. Citations below

edition.

102

the matter of

to effect this

he touches, and to do 15

all

in

the text refer to this

?

/ n credible

J oinings

chains of equivalence until the end of the chain actually joins

its

beginning to form a circle. The scene of Merlin’s conception is endlessly repeated in new guises. The chapter that is thematically climactic in the novel occurs when Merlin views the first fulfillment of Uther’s desire for Igrayne and learns how strong his voyeuristic tendencies are. Merlin has given Uther the shape of Igrayne’s husband, Gorlois, so that the king can act out a sexual fantasy that Merlin has placed in his mind. It is a scene of both sexual and semiotic lust, Igrayne and Uther supplying the sex while Merlin and the narrator seduce the reader to unnatural acts of semiosis. “Her body is firm and white as marble. Under the whip it has grown like marble inflamed. His prick is long and hard, like a little sword. And the man and the woman roll locked together across the bed, Igrayne’s body bucking to take the thrust of him. Nineve sees a sword thrust into a stone, a lance thrust bleeding into a golden cup” (pp. 146-48). Nineve is “seeing” sylleptically, seeing/observing and seeing/ understanding at the same time. She observes nothing more than Uther swiving Igrayne as hard as he can, but she understands this union as equivalent to the lance entering the cup or the sword entering the stone. But of course Nineve is a syllepsis herself, since she is “really” the shape-shifted Merlin, and he is watching the diabolical insemination of a lady who reminds him very much of his mother, Vivien. In other words, he is watching a repetition of his own conception. He will watch it again, when Arthur conceives a passion for Morgan le Fay and Merlin conjures her to his pleasure in the king’s secret chamber at Camelot. Arthur and Mordred are thus repetitions of Merlin himself, who is the devil’s son. Merlin is forever watching versions of himself performing the intercourse that will produce further versions of himself. In fact, he is even able to watch that “first” satanic copulation between Vivien and Lucifer. His crystal prison in the forest of Broceliande takes him out of time, though also out of action: “How come l am watching at my own conception Answer: What else is there to do in a ciystal cave!" (p. 24). And that is not the end of the matter, since Lucifer is identif ied with the author of the book (“I write all the books,” he says [p. 69], and “It is my father’s pride to imagine that he is writing this book with the aid of his lieutenants,” says Merlin [p. .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

/

103

The Lethetic Genre he author is oh the one hand Robert Nye but on the other Sir I homas Malory, from whom Nye has inherited the matter of the story and who was imprisoned, like Merlin, when he wrote the Morte d’Arthur. I he devil, Malory, Merlin, Arthur, Mordred, Uther, and Nye himself are all ‘the same,” all imprisoned in the 84]).

I

voyeuristic act of watching themselves

engender themselves.

Nor have we yet reached the end. Because Merlin is a shape shifter and has had occasion to appear in many nonhuman as

human

well as

forms, he identifies himself with everything he has appeared or could appear to be: was

many shapes

in

before

was Merlin.

have been a drop of a shield in the thick of the battle. I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of the sea. 1 have been a stiing of a harp. ... I have been Balin who killed his brother Balan. I have been Balan who killed his brother Balin. I have been a sword in the stone. I have been in a stone that floated on water. I have been a stag that flees. I was the invisible chess player who I

light in the air.

checkmated alchemist.

I

I

am

I

have been

Perceval at

Sir

I

Mount Dolorosus.

Merlin, the devil’s son.

I

am

Mercurius the

[P. 9]

All these things

eternity of his

I

he was in the days of his freedom he imprisonment:

am a man

be

in

turned inside-out. Once was adept. Once anything wished. A free shape-shifter. I

I

still is

in the

was able

to

I

Now

the tables ate turned

and

am

imprisoned in the shapes. Many. So that if I say I am shut in a tree which is one side green leaves and the other side flames, then that is true. And if I say that at one and the same time I am being held prisoner in a spiral castle

made

I

and that castle situate in a spinning island bounded by a metal wall and the island held fast in the sea by a great magnet that is ti lie also. And if say she has locked me under the earth in a rock tomb no change. [P. 12] of glass,

I

—

11k fiee Merlin could be in anything, and the imprisoned Merlin is trapped in everything. The narrative of Merlin’s bioglaphy presents the trapped version as audience and commentato! foi the adventures of the free version. Freedom and im-

prisonment are

/

104

’’the

same” for the necromancer,

as long as the

/ ncredible

self

is

the

same

as the self. Merlin

is

the vessel

(a

] oinings

form of grail)

in

which the alchemist changes everything into everything else: “ ‘Alchemy is metaphors,’ yon say. ‘The alchemist works on himself. His prima materia is him. He labors to transmute the base matter of his dreams into gold’” (p. 223). Merlin transmutes his dreams into the dreams of others, and these others (Uther and Arthur in particular) try to make the fantasies into a script to be acted out.

Merlin is the syllepsis of man and book, the book-of-Merlin is a source of scenarios according to which others may order their lives in an imitatio Merlini {— diaboli). Uther’s first fornication with Igrayne is the result of just such a process: Merlin suggests that Gorlois carries a whip for the purpose of chastising his naked wife. Uther “goes pale with desire as I speak the words in his ear, and sense some If

I

fantasy (p.

133).

by

my

head. ready.

chamber and Merlin no less so:

picture flash across a secret

.

.

.

in

his

skull”

Uther is excited, “I am thrilled own power to create the erotic fantasy in Uther’s Perhaps it is the source of the magic know alThe real world acts out the dream, or its necessarily I

.

.

.

imperfect copy” (p. 134). For this reason not only all the characters and objects in the novel must be seen as “the same” (that is, as Merlin) but all its actions as well. All of Merlin’s adventures are Merlin’s dreams acted out by avatars of Merlin on a stage set with trees, brooks, castles, and so forth inspirited by Merlin. Merlin is the retort in

which the transformations take place and the philosopher’s stone that makes them happen. Merlin is both the stone and the vessel. Merlin is the grail. It is no surprise, of course, that a fiction as thoroughly sylleptic as Nye’s can and indeed must accept both versions of the grail tradition at once, both that in which the grail is the vessel used at the last supper and that in which it is a holy and magical stone. Merlin tells Uther the first version, in which the grail cup was brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea but was somehow lost before it reached its intended sanctuary in Glastonbury (p. 124). But in the form of the tale’s commentator, he says, “I am the spirit of the stone. The Grail stone, that is. King Alexander found this stone at the entrance to Paradise. It is a cure for the world” (p. 13). The stone contains the spirit, and the cup /

105

The Lethetic Genre contains the liquid, so the grail must be the perfect container. Everything that contains anything, or might contain something, is

he woods where Merlin rides with Nimue “are a sunGrail” (p. 227); the snow that falls on England makes “all

a grail.

filled

I

the land a snow-filled Grail” (p. 100); and Friar Blaise, a cleric whose “nature is not chaste,” is described as having “palms made for the cupping of his own seed. Pearlpale grails” .

.

(p. 73).

.

sequence leads us right back to Merlin, ever cupping his own seed by watching himself engender himself. Merlin is the I

his

grail.

am

man

shut up in a maze of himself,” he says (p. 129), which statement is quite literally true in his case. He is imprisoned in a glass castle where everything he sees is a reflection of himself, and that castle (or that cup, or that stone) is the story of Merlin that Merlin has become. The devil his father is able to have Merlin confined in this prison because Merlin falls in love with his own story as it is embodied in the person of Nimue. She too is a shape shifter, appearing to Merlin in various forms: “I

a

One moment my mother nurses

me

the virgin Vivien

her breast and sings

at

Then when

me

by the

sits

She

fire.

to sleep.

awake the Lady Igrayne is beside me. She runs a lapwing on tiptoe, but naked, in one silver slipper.

Or

I

like

most disturbing of all the little Queen Morgan le Fay, her black-as-hell gown, dancing in the firelight. You change all the time as you move in and out of the shadows. [P. else

.

.

.

222]

But

to

like a

Beelzebub her appearance looking

glass.

He

is

is

looking

quite different:

“Her

face

at himself!” (p. 220). It

is

is

at

Nimue’s request that Merlin builds the Grail Castle that will serve as his prison, though he knows that it will mean his “death” (that is, the end of his story). Of course, Merlin the mage cannot die; he can only come to an end and begin again— like any book. Nyc has achieved what might seem a utopia of formalism, the ultimate coherent fiction in which there is nothing that does not

play note,’

essential role in the whole. I here is in this novel “no free to use the phrase of that other son of the devil, Adrian

Leverktihn.

he

coherence that Mann’s musician strives lor (with the help of his venereal Lucifer) is brought to perfec/

I

106

total

Incredible ] oinings

tion by Merlin.

But

I

think

it

is

clear that Nye’s intentions are to

give us not utopia but atopia. This coherence

we cannot

so complete, so

is

Everyone is Merlin. Everything is a grail. All grails are Merlins. We cannot take this coherence any more seriously than the coherence of arguments with bars of soap. Needless to say, given the limitless range of Nye’s syllepsis, we find that his Merlin can be understood to unite an argument that he is the Pope well, not the Pope himself, perhaps, but the papal nuncio with a bar of soap. Sir Gawain finds his perfect, that

—

credit

it.

—

version of the Grail Gastle (death) by slipping on a bar of soap.

What

bar of soap? Do we take this seriously? Is this not a version of the Sleeve Job? I have not as yet mentioned the Sleeve Job, because it provides the last best argument that this ultimate syllepsis, this total coherence, this formalist never-never land, is served up in the expectation that we will not believe it. As we are being told the story of Merlin, we are promised, teased, and threatened with the story of Sir Gawain and the Sleeve Job, a tale that the demon Astarot wants to tell Lucifer. Finally, when Merlin is in the process of building the Grail Castle that will imprison him at the spirit inhabits that fatal

—

—

end of the novel therefore Astarot has his chance. He explains that Sir Gawain met a damsel in the forest of Broceliande who was so impressed with Gawain's knightly behavior (he refrained from raping her) that she offered to reward him with a unique and forbidden perversion called the Sleeve Job. Gawain has never heard of the Sleeve Job but imagines that it must be absolutely exquisite, since it is forbidden. Instead of accepting her very tempting offer on the spot, Gawain offers to marry the lady and to receive from her “the promised and forbidden Sleeve Job on their wedding night,” which by custom cannot occur until seven years of betrothal have passed. After this long and frustrating delay, the wedding night arrives, and Gawain reminds his new bride of her vow. She had forgotten. She resists, but finally she agrees to deliver the long-awaited Sleeve Job:

‘“Go into the bathroom and lather yourself. naked and covered from top to toe with soap. to me here, and you shall have the Sleeve Job. does just as the young enchantress has told him.

want you stark

I

.

.

.

.

.

.’

.

Then come hack And Sir Gawain He is running .

.

/

107

The Lethetic Genre Naked! Soapy! All ready! The Sleeve Job! the sleeve Now! But what’s this? Running, Sir Gawain’s right foot alights

to his love!

job!

on

a

little

tiny

insignificant

cake of soap. ...

He

slips!

He

“But Sir Gawain?” says my father. “Brained himself on the iron bed,’’ says Uncle Astarot. “But the Sleeve Job?” says my uncle Beelzebub.

“Ah

yes,

the Sleeve Job,” says

my

uncle Astarot. “Well, Sir

Gawain being dead, he never did find out what the Sleeve Job is.” So how can this be the end of it all?” screams my father. My uncle the count Astarot holds up his right hand in blessing. didn say it was the end of it all,” he says, choosing his words with care. “There was and shall be no end of it all. Ever. World without end, remember?” He grins from ear to ear and crosses I

t

himself with his tail. “Begin,” he says. “Again,” he says. “Begin again,” he says. “This is just the end of the story,” he explains IPp

235-38]

And

it

is

also the

end

of the novel.

Gawain may not have lived to have the Sleeve Job practiced upon him, but Lucifer and the reader have certainly had it practiced upon them. Near the beginning of the narrative, in the middle of a mock-sermon by Beelzebub possessing the person of fiiai Blaise, the fiiai is made to say, ‘My child, if this great con of the devil s is conceded, why, what then? Does the world come to a stop? Time turn itself inside-out? Solomon in all his wisdom achieve the Sleeve Job? No” (p. 40). But indeed Merl in’s selfimprisonment in the Grail Gastle makes him into “a man turned inside-out,” and narrative time is turned inside-out by Astarot’s trick. The whole story is one enormous Sleeve Job, turning back upon itself, not as part of a self-conscious formalism but as part of a huge dirty joke in which the joke is on Merlin, Lucifer, and Sir

the reader.

By ending

Nye has prevented all alethetic reading. Here is

Sleeve Job,

tempts

at

his novel with the story

of Sir Gawain and the but the most determined at-

a vivid demonstration of how the formalist aesthetic can be driven beyond all bounds of credibility 1

— not to mention propriety—by a joyously excessive

rigor.

hree decades of literary criticism have asked for the Sleeve Job,

/

108

incredible J innings

and is little wonder that someone has finally obliged. And though this fantastic playing with correspondences, this unit

limited syllepsis, could be read as a parodistic critique of formal-

do not think has any other goal than to celebrate “Merlin’s merry muse." That at least is the implication of Nye’s choice for the epigraph on his title page of this line from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini: “Fatidici vatis rabiem musamque jocasam Merlini cantare paro” (“I prepare to sing the madness and the merry muse of the prophetic seer Merlin”). A musa jocosa unquestionably inspires Nye’s book from beginning to ism,

I

really

it

end.

proper

about an “ironic tone” taking hold of a work and suffusing it, it is equally correct to speak of the sylleptic spirit of Robert Nye's Merlin. Lewis Carroll and (at times) Oscar Wilde may seem closer to the rhetorical roots of syllepsis, because we can often identify sylleptic figures that the fictional atopia then imitates. But Nye is, if anything, more rigorous in his application of the sylleptic idea: language joins that which we believe belongs apart. Once we understand this notion, it is easy to see why we must regard Merlin (and indeed all sylleptic narrative) as fundamentally logomimetic. The structure of Merlin’s world does not correspond to that of our real, everyday world, in which we believe, but to another incredible structure achievable only in speech. Language, as Nimue appropriately observes, A story world made exis the perfect alchemist’s material. clusively of infinitely transmutable material can model itself only on the limitless transmutability of metaphor. In Nye’s work no less than in Carroll’s, the incredible flights of fancy are given a kind of authority and justification by linguistic structures, familiar patterns of speech making unfamiliar patterns of thought acceptable. Since conventional literary language has made familiar to us talk of skin that is “white as marble” and erections like swords, the fancy that makes the coupling of Igrayne and Uther equivalent to the Arthurian “sword in the stone” seems to have its feet on the ground. Everyday language gives the marvelous an anchor in the familiar and thereby makes it “right.” Nye’s syllepsis does not come from If

it

is

to talk

/

109

The Lethetic Genre nowhere and baffle ns; it comes from the commonest of commonplaces, whence it attains the reader’s assent. Nye, Wilde, and Carroll, though each was working in a different way and toward a different end, all found in syllepsis a method for connecting the reader’s world with the atopia of fantasy.

/110

Chapter

6

Incredible S underings:

Dialepsis in Christian

Nicolai Gogol,

Morgens tern,

and Edgar Allan Poe

Suetonius reports

Caesar was able to intimidate Bibulus, his fellow consul for the year 59 b.c., to such a degree that Bibulus remained at home and left Caesar to govern Rome by himself. Caesar had so effectively seized total control of the government that “some citizens, when they were supposed to sign something as witnesses, would as a joke write the date not [in the usual form as] ‘in the consulate of Caesar and Bibulus’ but rather as ‘in the consulate of Julius and Caesar' ” (ut nonnulli urbanorum cum quid per iocum testandi gratia signarent non Caesare et Bibulo sed Iulio et Caesare consulibus actum in his Iulius (20.2) that

scriberent).

The joke depends on

a confrontation

between the structure of

language and the structure of what we believe is reality. The conventional Latin designation for a particular year requires two names, those of the two consuls governing; but the political realities of the year 59 b.c. were such that in fact only one man was governing. Language is able to resolve the difficulty by making use of the fact that a single person may have several names, in effect thereby dividing the person. The individual person Julius Caesar is easily split into two verbal objects, “Julius” and “Caesar,” which language may then treat as completely independent entities. We do something similar in English when we say “between a rock and a hard place” or “six of one, half a dozen of

/111

Ihe Lethetic Genre the other.”

word

From

the point of view of language, every separate a separate “thing.”

is

Classical rhetoric did not give a

turn of speech.

name

to this relatively

unusual

might well have noted the relation between this trope and syllepsis. As we have seen, syllepsis works on the capability of language to put together what we believe reality keeps apart. 1 he “Julius and Caesar” Figure works in an analogous but opposite way: here language divides what, we would insist, reality keeps together. If the first figure is a “taking together” (syllepsis), the second is clearly a “taking apart” ( dialep sis). We may speak of this sort of locution, then, both conveniently

If

and properly,

Many

it

had,

it

as dialepsis.

have become familiar with the possibilities of dialepsis from one of the enduring witticisms of childhood, in which a disagreement between two children is to be settled by a vote, one child claiming a majority of three to one because of the votes of “me, myself, and I.” Three different words are asserted to imply three different “persons.” Ihe child proposing this dialepsis of the single self into three is not likely to be successful without being able to prevail by other means because children learn very early the vast differences between the structure of language and the structure of the world. But if the child were successful, if his or her playmates accepted the propriety of this mystic division, there would be no more dialepsis. Like syllepsis, dialepsis comes into being only when the structure proposed by language conflicts with what we believe is the structure of reality. If the structure of language is accepted as mirroring the world, the trope ceases to be a lethetic figure and may indeed cease to of us will

—

—

be a figure

at all.

One might

investigate the trope at greater length, but here

again, as with syllepsis,

my central

narrowly conceived, but with the tive

that

suggests.

Dialepsis

concern

is

not with the trope,

possibilities for lethetic narra-

evidently also a figure of thought, a concept that can be used as the foundation for structures more complex than an individual phrase. Many writers of it

fantasy have built

upon

is

foundation, perhaps none, however, more consistently and characteristically than Christian Morgenstern. Like Lewis Carroll, Morgenstern is best known for his “nonsense” verse; but whereas Carroll tends to base his log-

/

1

12

this

/ ncredible

omimesis on

syllepsis,

Sunderings

Morgenstern more often chooses

dia-

lepsis.

Morgensterns nonsense universe is characterized by a neverending confrontation between the structure of language and the structure of the world, with language always victorious the atopia of the fiction. Ordinarily the

poems show

—within

us the re-

of such a victory by language, but from time to time the confrontation itself is dramatized. A good example for my purpose is “Der Werwolf' (“The Werewolf’). The poem tells how a werewolf comes one night to the grave of a village schoolteacher sults

1

with the request that the dead teacher arise and “decline

The

me”

teacher does so: der Werwolf des Wesiuolfs, dem Wemwolf, den Wenwolf. But when the werewolf requests that he go on to decline also the plural, the teacher confesses that he (beuge mich).

There are plenty of

,

he explains, but wer exists only in the singular. The werewolfs eyes fill with tears at the thought of his wife and child, whose existence is threatened by this news, but “because he was no scholar, he departed with thanks and humility” (pp. 66—67). Because the German word Werwolf gives the appearance of being a composite of the interrogative pronoun wer with the ordinary noun Wolf, Morgenstern’s schoolteacher is able to produce a nonsense paradigm for all four cases of the singular. But indeed the interrogative pronoun in German happens to be declinable only in the singular; one uses singular forms no matter how many people one is inquiring about. He cannot continue his silly-scholarly exercise into the plural, so he simply declares that the plural does not exist. This is wonderfully clever fun so far, but now Morgenstern adds the brilliant touch. In a world that contains werewolves and speaking corpses, the issue of what language will and will not allow holds life-and-death interest. If by the incredible (but linguistically justified) logic of the teacher the word Werwolf can only exist in the singular, the “object” werewolf whose existence is after all purely a figment of speech must be similarly limited. This werewolf must be the only werewolf; the wife and child cannot be. cannot.

—

'I

cite

numbers

Wolfe,

—

Morgenstern front the Galgenlieder in

my

(Berlin:

Bruno

Cassirer, 1921). Page

text refer to this edition.

/

1

13

— The Lethetic Genre he poor werewolf has suffered from the effects of a process quite the same as that practiced upon Julius Caesar in the ancient Roman joke. His name has been taken apart and used in a way that we do not consider “really” legitimate. Paradoxically, I

this

dialepsis

werewolf

results

in

the fantastic assertion not that the

two creatures but rather that his species cannot contain more than one member. The (incredible) separation of Wer from Wolf creates a conflict between the two parts of the werewolf s name that the teacher can resolve only by leaving the pieces sundered: “Zwar Wolfe gab’s in grosser Schar, doch ‘Wer’ gab’s nur im Singular.” His inability to put the pieces back together leaves the werewolf bereft of plurality. “Der Werwolf’ presents a dialepsis of language upon itself, the results of which threaten to restructure the atopic world of the poem. Morgenstern’s dialepsis is usually more direct, however, as in his famous poem about the picket fence (“Der Lattenis

zaun”): Es war einmal ein Lattenzaun, mit Zwischenraum, hindurchzuschaun. Ein Architekt, der dieses sah, stand eines Abends plotzlich da

und nahm den Zwischenraum heraus und baute draus ein grosses Haus. Der Zaun indessen stand ganz mit Latten ohne was herum. Ein Anblick grasslich

Drum

dumm,

und gemein.

zog ihn der Senat auch

ein.

Der Architekt jedoch entfloh nach Afri-od-Ameriko. [P. 33] 2 2

A rough

English translation: “There was once a picket fence with spaces to look through. An architect who saw it stood suddenly by it one evening and took the spaces out and built a big house out of them. Meanwhile the fence stood there stupidly with pickets with nothing around them. A disgusting and vulgar sight. So the city council called it in. But the architect absconded to Afri-or-

—

Ameriko.”

/

1

14

a

/ ncredi hie

What

S u nderings

only threatened in the poem of the werewolf is put into practice here: the world is rebuilt on the basis of language’s ability to give separate names to things which have no independent existence. Although we do not believe that Zwischenraum is

can exist apart from the objects around it, the noun Zwischenraum has all the capabilities that other nouns have. The verbal picket fence can be disassembled into “pickets” and “spaces,” and the spaces can be taken away and used as materials to build

something

else.

Morgenstern’s brilliance does not reside entirely or even chiefly in creating this sort of dialeptic atopia. What makes these poems glitter is the rigor with which the principles are applied. That the architect can build himself a house from the stolen Zwischenraum is amusing; but that the reader’s attention is then directed back to the fence and the problem of its lack of intervening spaces is an inspired stroke. If Zwischenraum is a substance capable of being used to build houses, its absence must be understood as denuding the fence of something. The remaining pickets are described in terms that suggest vulgar nakedness lack of clothing or horrifying bareness, as if they were a skeleton deprived of the flesh that would properly cover them: “Ein Anblick grasslich und gemein.” The shocked city government has to intervene, presumably to protect the public from such a disgraceful display of “Latten ohne was herum.”

—

—

The chief focus

poem, in fact, is not the Zwischenraum itself or the house that is built from it but the terrible results of that loss. That the architect has actually managed to “make something out of nothing” is marvelous, but no more so than what we find in countless fairy tales and fantasies, and Morfor the

genstern simply mentions it, as it were, in passing, l he architect is treated not as the hero of a marvelous adventure but as a criminal who has committed an outrageous act of defacement. The poem presents him as someone who has done something terrible to the fence rather than as someone who has done something wonderful with “space.” He runs off to a foreign country in fact to a verbal amalgam of all the foreign countries traditionally sought by European outcasts. The little story is thus made symmetrical by the architect’s having to pay with his ab-

—

sence for his act of making absence (Zwischenraum) absent.

/

1

15

— The Lethetic Genre Symmetry is important to this poem, because the dialepsis upon which it is constructed originates in an inappropriate (that is,

incredible) imposition of

symmetry. Since

it

is

obviously possi-

from a fence leaving nothing but space, the poem assumes that one ought to be able also to remove the spaces until there is nothing left but pickets, “Latten ohne was herum.” If we can separate pickets from spaces, why not spaces from pickets? This is an important point, because the dialepsis comes into being only when the second incredible separation is proposed. 3 There is nothing incredible or even unusual in separating things from certain spaces, and there would be no dialepsis if the architect had taken the pickets away to build a house leaving nothing but bare space on the fence. It is not the separation itself that engenders the dialepsis but rather the fact that the “wrong” element has suffered removal. We are prepared to believe that pickets can exist apart from spaces: it is the idea of “Raume ohne was herum” that we do not credit and that makes ble to

the

remove

pickets

poem work.

another of the Galgenlieder describes the unhappy adventures of a sigh that goes skating one night (“Der Seufzer'' Similarly,

[p. 21]:

Ein Seufzer

lief

Schlittschuh auf nachtlichem Eis

und traumte von Eiebe und Freude. Es war an dem Stadtwall, und schneeweiss glanzten die Stadtwallgebaude.

Der Seufzer dacht’ an ein Maidelein und blieb ergliihend stehen. Da schmolz die Eisbahn unter ihm ein und er sank und ward nimmer gesehen. 4

—

The

separation of a sigh from a person

long as we assume that the person only

Tompare

the locution

“doughnut

is is

nothing unusual as capable of indepen-

which catches our attention by prethe bakery selling empty spaces?) that is exholes,”

senting an apparent dialepsis (Is ploded by the realization that these “holes” are not in fact the holes themselves but rather the dough removed in order to make the holes.

“A sigh went skating on nocturnal ice and dreamed of love was near the city dike, and the city-dike buildings gleamed white as snow. The sigh thought about a maiden and stopped, burning with passion. So the ice underneath him melted and he sank and was never seen again.” •In literal English:

and joy.

It

—

/

1

16

—

— / ncredible

Sunderings

dent existence. We can easily imagine a person without a sigh, but we have difficulty imagining a sigh without a person. We have no difficulty speaking of it, however: our language works perfectly well

no matter what noun we make object of the pre-

position “without.”

Once language has spoken

the phrase “sigh without a person”

or “spaces without pickets,” there

nothing to stop its pushing the process further. Sighs and spaces that are capable of taking over the quality of independent existence from persons and pickets may take over additional qualities as well. Thus the architect is able to build a house out of the Zwischenraum he has stolen, something one could indeed do with pickets. And the sigh takes on the human characteristics of going ice skating and burning with passion. Indeed, there is no way to picture the scene described by Morgenstern without giving the sigh at least a quasi-human shape. But “Der Seufzer,” even more forcefully than “Der Werwolf,” demonstrates the destructive as well as the creative potential of logomimesis. If the sigh gains its independent existence by rhetoric, so does it die by rhetoric as well. It is not by accident that Morgenstern gives the sigh this peculiar combination of human traits ice skating and lovesickness since precisely this combination turns out to be fatally dangerous in the atopia ruled by language. When one is in love, one burns with passion (ergliiht), and the logomimetic principle transforms that metaphorical heat into energy sufficient to melt ice. fhe same process that made the invisible sigh into a fictionally visible form transforms it into something that “ward nimmer gesehen.” Again, Morgenstern works with symmetrical nonsense. is

—

He

works with nonsense that is on or near the borders of what was known in Poe’s day as “German” horror. “Der Werwolf,” “Der Lattenzaun,” and “Der Seufzer” are all delightful poems, but they all contain a more or less heavy whiff of the tomb. “Der Lattenzaun” is lie lightest in tone of all of them, since no one dies in the poem or starts off dead. Yet even here there is a macabre cast to the playfulness, with the central action described as a criminal act resulting in an “Anblick grasslich und gemein.” In short, there is ample reason for these particular nonsense verses to be called Galgenlieder (“Gallows Songs”). In a few, this vein of gallows humor reaches such a degree of purity that the horrifying and the comic blend into an inseparable imalso

t

/

1

17

— The Lethetic Genre age, at once attractive in

logomimetic power and repellent its grimness. “Das Knie” is such a poem. This poem does little more than assert that a knee makes lonely way through the world: its

in

its

Ein Knie geht einsam durch die Welt. Es ist ein Knie, sonst nichts!

Baum! Es

Es

ist

kein

Es

ist

ein Knie, sonst nichts.

ist

kein Zelt!

Im Kriege ward einmal ein Mann erschossen um und um. Das Knie

allein blieb unverletzt

Als war’s ein Heiligtum.

Seitdem geht’s einsam durch die Welt. Es

ist

ein Knie, sonst nichts.

Es

ist

kein

Es

ist

ein Knie, sonst nichts. [P.

Baum,

es

ist

kein Zelt.

20p

Because it is a lethetic fiction, the poem ignores the question of how a knee could accomplish this independent, if lonely, existence, but it offers instead an explanation of how the knee came to be alone. It is simply all that is left after a steady process of effacement of a human body by gunfire. It is no longer connected to the human world at all, save perhaps by the fact that it retains the ability to move through the world. It is just another object, like a tree or a tent.

Morgenstern here presents in the sparest possible terms that form of dialepsis that is most prevalent in lethetic literature, the separation of one part of the body from the rest of the person. I his notion has been the origin of countless marvelous tales, sometimes comic, more often horrifying. Several of these will be the subject of detailed discussion below.

The knee of the 5 “A

Galgenlieder

is

of special interest because Mor-

knee goes lonely through the world.

It’s just a knee, that’s all! It’s not a not a tent! It’s just a knee, that’s all. Once in the war a man was all shot up. His knee alone remained unwounded, as if it were a shrine. Since then it goes lonely through the world. It’s just a knee, that’s all. It’s not a tree, it’s not a tent. It’s just a knee, that’s all.”

tree!

It’s

/

1

18

1 ncr edible

S u nderi ngs

genstern has so balanced the humor and horror of his fantastic image. The notion of a man being slowly shot away until nothing but his knee

were a shrine”) is surely horrifying. But we cannot help finding it funny that a knee, a part of the body not ordinarily thought particularly handsome or noble, is the one thing left unharmed. A knee in isolation is not exactly a is

left (“as if

it

and it is made sillier still by the addition of some unspecified form of locomotion. In fact, the first stanza, read in isolation, would probably seem uncomplicatedly humorous. But

dignified idea,

after presenting the ghastly history recounted in the second

Morgenstern

stanza,

is

able to repeat the

first

quatrain almost

word for word with an entirely new effect. What seemed just silly and amusing at first is now disquietingly complex. We are

how

not sure

Another

dialeptic fiction that renders

how

about

to react.

to react

is

Gogol’s

particular that contributes so

its

“The Nose.”

much

readers uncertain It

this story in

is

to Gogol’s reputation of

being “controversial, puzzling, and elusive.” 6 It would not be amiss to think of it as the Russian equivalent of the Birds, so extensive is the literature seeking, without success, to reduce it to sense, to find some clear and firm line to take about its meaning. “The narrative has been subjected to numerous interpretations: sociological, metaphysical, psychological,

Castration anxiety [all this]

.

.

.

,

it

.

.

.

and psychoanalytical.

has also been mentioned. ... In spite of

may simply be

that

Gogol intended only

to pro-

7

Pushkin suggested.” One thing we may take as certain, however: that Gogol’s tale is a towering example of the dialeptic imagination at work. Gogol has separated the inseparable and has granted independence to something we know to be absolutely dependent. Like Morgenstern, Gogol enforces an inappropriate symmetry in his nonsense world. The nose of collegiate assessor Kovalyov gets the uniform, the status, the high social position to which a noseless Kovalyov aspires. Just as the spaces in Morgenstern’s “Der Lattenzaun” obtain more dignity than the pickets (the spaces are vide a nonsensical

made

jest,

as

into a house, while the pickets just stand there nakedly), so

6 Fruma Gottschalk, ed.,

The Nose (Letchworth: Prideaux Press, 1972),

"Ibid.

/

1

19

9.

The Lethetic Genre docs the nose have greater dignity than its former owner. When Kovalyov confronts his nose in the cathedral, he stammers, coughs, and speaks in incoherent fragments: “I don't know how best to put it, sir, but it strikes me as very peculiar. Don’t you know where you belong? And where do I find you? In church, .

of

all

When

places!”

.

.

more of this hemming and

af ter a great deal

hawing, Kovalyov finally comes out with it (“Don’t you realize you are my own nose!"), the nose replies with perfect aplomb and more than a little condescension, “My dear fellow, you are mistaken. I am a person in my own right. Furthermore, I don’t see that we can have anything in common. Judging from your uniform buttons, I should say you’re from another government department.” 8 This dialepsis of Kovalyov’s

body

somehow

of his identity, of his self. In fact, the whole story can be understood as a logomimesis on the idea of being apart from one’s self: a certain level of excitement can make a man “beside himself,” as Kovalyov is described later in the story (p. 61). Russian has an analogous expression, vnye syebya (literally “outside also

is

a division

Gogol uses here, 9 undoubtedly intending it to be and metaphorically true for Kovalyov. The colle-

oneself’), that

both

literally

locked out of the social “place” that he believes is the rightful place of his true self. The nose becomes the insider: “Judging by its uniform, its hat, and its whole appearance, it giate assessor

must be

is

a state councillor” (p. 49).

Such

a

one can only look

down his nose at the likes of Kovalyov. The person who first discovers Kovalyov’s

nose, the barber

Ivan Yakovlevich, suffers from a similar logomimetic loss of “himself’: the narrator reports that “his surname has got lost

and

all

that his shop-front signboard

shows

is

a

gentleman with

a

lathered cheek and the inscription ‘We also let blood’” (p. 42). If a man can be vnye syebya, “outside himself,” and if a man can lose part of his verbal self, his

name, then

a

man might

very well

also lose a part of his physical self. In

barber

who

loses part of his

8 Diary

own

self

another symmetry, the discovers the lost part of

of a Madman and Other Stones, trans. Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 50. Citations below in the text refer to this edition. 9 Gottschalk, ed., The Nose, 33.

/

120

1

Inc redi ble S u nde ri ngs

someone

else’s dialeptically

severed

self.

He

instantly recognizes

Kovalyov’s nose, which he finds in a breakfast roll. It is from these humble beginnings that the nose rises practically instantaneously to the heights of “state councillor.”

one of the best critics of Gogol has already indicated that “The Nose” is a story that puts language in total charge. Donald Fanger, referring to Roland Barthes’s notion of irony as “the question posed by language to language” that “expands the language rather than narrowing it,” calls such expansion “the principal achievement of ‘The Nose,’ which forces the reader to contemplate nothing less than the autonomy of the word (as he tries to picture the nose frowning, praying, hurrying, decked out in a resplendent uniform).” 10 Fanger understands Gogol to be pushing his dialeptic premise as far as it will go. It is not enough to assert that a person’s nose could exist apart from the person; Gogol pushes forward by substituting the word “nose” for “person” in all sorts of sentences, making “nose” the subject At

least

of a variety of verbs ordinarily requiring a human subject (“pray,” “wear,” “reply,” “frown,” and so forth). The “autonomy of the word” is forced upon the reader’s attention because sentences such as “The nose’s face was completely hidden by the high collar and it was praying with an expression of profound piety” (p. 49) cannot occur in the phenomenal world or even in the imagination. All one can do with them is say them. Fanger sees “more than downright nonsense” in the creation of such an autonomy of the word. Though he does not disagree with the position that “The Nose” is as a whole a nonsensical fiction (“too much of the text escapes” every interpretation that Fanger would see it as a nonsensical tries to make sense of it, fiction that over and over again provokes the reader to an inevitably unsuccessful attempt at alethetic reading. “The tempta1

meanings into the story arises from the fact that fragments of meaning can be read out of it.” 12 Sometimes the story seems to be aiming at pure satire, shooting down the familiar targets of social pretension and self-delusion. Sometimes it tion to read

H) The Creation

121

of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge:

Harvard University

Press, 1979),

.

"Ibid., 120. l2 Ibid.,

121.

/

12

1

The Lethetic Genre looks like an allegory of the person who finds himself “out of place” in ordinary society. The large number of such familiar

and conventional elements might,

another context, be clues to a convincing interpretation of the story’s meaning. The combination, however, “mocks a serious attitude toward the plot (the accepted notion of significant form)” and “mocks ordinary assumptions about intentionality (the very notion of language as the carrier of messages).” 13 The story as a whole becomes “a trap for the unwary.” If Fanger is right, “The Nose” may be not a genuinely lethetic text but rather

intentionality.

in

one that has the (alethetic) intention of mocking An element of satire has come in the back door,

though the target

not Kovalyov or his social pretensions but rather the reader’s own urge to alethetic reading. To that end it does not, like the Birds, try to prevent alethetic reading; it rather quickens our desire for meaning only to frustrate it. The story’s atopia,

its

autonomous realm of language, becomes

we would have, defined

is

then,

is

a trap.

not exactly a lethetic Fiction, as

but something

more

I

What have

an antialethetic fiction. Lethetic fictions are never “traps for the unwary,” because they do not even occasionally ask to be read allegorically. Gogol’s story, as Fanger reads it, solicits disbelief as a whole, while various of its it,

parts lure us

down

false trails

to lead to belief in the

text for the alethetic

whole.

like

of allegory, It

trails

uses the overall

that

would seem

form of a

lethetic

purpose of exposing the process of alethetic

reading.

Fanger’s position

may be taken

as a

demonstration of the

irre-

power that alethetic reading exerts upon literary criticism. Even “ I he Nose,” one of the most outrageously incredible tales in the canon of modern literature, becomes a message sistible

about the nonexistence of messages. This conversion is perfectly legitimate, of course, and I do not wish to appear to object to Fanger’s procedure. His job is to read Gogol, which he does admirably and alethetically. But one does not have to object to Fanger’s reading to suppose that the option of seeing “The Nose” as a lethetic text still remains open. Let us suppose that we are not in the least tempted to read meanings into the story; let us suppose that we are willing to let the autonomous realm of

—

13 Ibid.,

122.

/

122

Incred ible S u n derings

own

way; and let us suppose that the story is not a trap that threatens to confine us but a magic “word” that offers to liberate us. In that case, “The Nose” could remain a dialeptic fantasy with no messages to deliver. I he story is disquieting enough, even understood as a lethetic fiction. The comic tone that prevails cannot entirely wipe out the potential for horror (or, at the very least, the grotesque) in the

language go

central

its

image

of

dismemberment. “We

also

let

blood,” says the

he threat of violence remains palpable throughout the tale, as when the nose’s appearance on Nevsky Prospect causes “such a crush outside that the police had to be called” (p. 66). Like Morgenstern’s “Das Knie,” Gogol’s story with a light touch presents material that is by nature extremely unpleasant and that could be downright frightening. In fact, the story seems at times both funny and frightening at the same time, funny because it is so outrageous in its fantasy, frightening because the subject of that fantasy is dismemberment. Freud has apparently provided once and for all an explanation for the powerful and deeply ambivalent reactions elicited by these fantasies of dismemberment in his essay on “The ‘Uncanny.’ ” Our sense of horror arises not out of shock that such violence has been done to someone else but rather out of fear that something analogous could happen to us. Freud argues that “it is the threat of being castrated in especial which excites a peculiarly violent and obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense colourbarber’s sign.

ing.” 11

I

“Dismembered

limbs, a severed head, a

the wrist, feet which dance by themselves

—

all

instance, they prove able to

As we already know,

at

these have some-

thing peculiarly uncanny about them, especially last

hand cut off

when

move of themselves

as in the

in addition.

kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration-complex” (p. 151). This fear of this

one to us, Freud asserts, but we repress it. The uncanny emotion arises when this familiar but repressed feeling is reawakened in us by a stimulus that reminds us, in castration

is

a familiar

spite of ourselves, It

&

is

of

this infantile anxiety.

important, however

— particularly so

in this

context

—

to

•^Benjamin Nelson, ed., On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper Row, 1958), 138. Citations below in the text refer to this edition.

/

123

The Lethetic Genre Freud set up a number of significant hedges around his argument about the repression-compulsion and the uncanny. It is clear that Freud is aware of the existence of a special class of fictions that solicit disbelief and of special conditions that recall that

attach to the reading of these (in

my

terminology

lethetic)

fictions:

he story-teller has this license among others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities I

we are

familiar with or departs

pleases.

We

from them

in

what particulars he

accept his ruling in every case. In fairy-tales, for

stance, the world of reality

is

left

behind from the very

start,

in-

and

the animistic system of beliefs

is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfilments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of lifeless objects, all the elements so common in fairy-stories, can exert

no uncanny influence here;

for, as

we have learnt, that feeling of judgment whether things

cannot arise unless there is a conflict which have been “surmounted” and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible; and this problem is excluded from the beginning by the setting of the story. [P. 150]

Like

odorov’s “fantastic,” Freud’s uncanny requires a hesitation between a natural and a supernatural view of events reported. I he uncanny feeling will not arise unless we are I

prompted

wonder

something we have always thought to be impossible might yet happen. But this is precisely what cannot happen in the case of lethetic fictions like Gogol’s “Nose” and Morgenstern’s “Das Knie.” Because such fictions make not the slightest attempt to obtain belief for their impossible premises, there is never any question of our supposing that it might somehow be possible for a knee or a nose to wander through the world independent of a person. The thought is potentially horrible, but its horror cannot touch us because the boundary of our disbelief protects us from it. The horror is there, but it is, as it were, on the other side of a glass wall, like a python in a herpetarium. I he python is, in itself, frightening; but the situation in which the python is presented is to

if

reassuring.

Our ambivalence about Knie” works along similar

the horror in lines.

It is

“The Nose” and “Das

not the shock of the uncan-

/ ncredible

S underings

ny or the pleasant hesitation of lie fantastic; it is the assured safety of lethetic fiction, wherein he most terrible things may he displayed without arousing anxiety. We can laugh at what happens behind the glass wall because we know it will not happen to us. Morgenstern’s and Gogol’s nonsense is not uncanny because it is not problematic. We know that we are not in danger of being reduced to anything resembling ambulatory knees and noses, since such things are not possible in the world we inhabit. t

t

reader believed that the structure of language could shape the structure of the world, he woidd indeed suffer from Freud’s uncanny and worse. But such belief is radically excluded by narratives that are lethetic: the reader always remains at home in a world that operates in familiar often boringly familiar ways. I'he question then arises as to whether it is possible for lethetic texts to be frightening. If the reader is always safe, the actions of the fiction can have no direct effect upon him. How could a story that we do not believe frighten us? Can there be such a thing as a lethetic horror story? The question is answered for us in the tales of that master of lethetic horror Edgar Allan Poe. For though there is no question that Poe’s stories achieve their frightening effects on large numbers of readers, it appears highly doubtful that (whatever Poe himself may have thought) large numbers of these readers actually believe what they read. The only open question in this regard is whether these obviously apistic fictions are to be understood simply as highly successful entertainment or as allegories of something “deeper.” As I have emphasized from the beginning, there is no argument that will definitively preclude the alethetic reading of any text. Allegorizing readings of the Birds will probably never cease, no matter what Cedric Whitman or I may say, because the assumption behind alethetic reading that fiction, no matter how outlandish, conceals some hidden kernel of truth is an article of hermeneutic faith not refutable by human discourse. The If the

—

—

—

—

question before us always must be, therefore, whether the text in question is genuinely enriched hy allegorical interpretation. A comic fantasy like the Birds seems to me to achieve its aims without the aid of alethetic reading. The same obviously cannot be

/

125

The

Lethf.tic

Genre

said for The Faerie Queene or for the fantastic tales of Borges:

such texts are impoverished by failure to read alethetically. Are the tales of Poe more like the Birds or The Faerie Queene in this respect? It is my contention, for reasons that will become evident in what follows, that they are more like the Birds. I contend further that many of Poe’s tales are in fact lethetic horror stories based upon dialepsis. It is

remind ourselves, as J. L. Austin language can do other things than

occasionally necessary to

has helped us to do, that

correspond

can have other goals than to convey the truth. A work of fiction, like any other utterance, may perform one or more of several actions, none of which may involve communication of the truth. The Birds, the Miinchhausen stories, and numerous other tall tales have no other purpose than to amuse us. They have their effect and thus succeed by making us to the facts,

make it their legitimate business to do nothing more than make us cry. An example that happens to be

laugh. Other fictions

prominent

at the

time

I

am

writing

adult believes but which nevertheless

is

the film FT., which no

from all but the most cynical. We are glad it makes us cry; that is what we want it to do, and we expect nothing more. One can “discover” no end of deeper truths in such fiction (the “Christian” interpretation of E.T. is currently making the rounds), but they are genuinely irrelevant. We go to the Birds to laugh and to E.T. to cry, and all the hidden messages in the world will not add anything to their elicits tears

success.

And we go

Edgar Allan Poe

be frightened. Few people can succeed in frightening us as well as he, and even fewer really care if he does anything else. The interesting and important question for literary criticism ought to be not “What meaning can we extract from these texts?” but rather “How do these texts to

to

succeed so well in doing what everyone acknowledges they do?” How and why, in other words, do Poe’s tales achieve the remarkable effect of frightening us withoug producing genuine anxiety? If Aristotle was confronted with the problem of how and why peo-

pleasure from watching tragedies, we are confronted with the analogous question of how and why people derive pleasure from being frightened by Poe. The questions are similar, though I make no pretentions to equality with Arisple derived

/

126

/ ncredible

Sunderings

nor do imagine that my answers will he as usef ul as his. My answers are, in any case, very different. One key to understanding Poe’s success at composing lethetic horror stories comes from an unlikely source: the epigraph to one of lie less famous tales, “The Man That Was Used Up.” This is one of Poe’s humorous ictions, one that obviously wishes only to provoke laughter and does not expect to frighten anyone. In going to this tale follow the recommendation of William Carlos Williams, who suggests that “to understand what Poe is driving at in his tales, we should read first not the popular, totle,

I

t

f

I

perfect

some

.

.

.

but the

less striking tales .” 15

The

story

itself

is

of

but the epigraph from Corneille gives us a clue about the working of Poe’s imagination. The French original reads, “Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez-vous en eau!/La moitie de ma vie a mis l’autre au tombeau” ( Le Cid, in, iii), and Poe gives this English version: “Weep, weep, my eyes! It is no time to laugh/For half myself has buried the other half.” The interest,

translation

is

rather free, and the contrast

The second

it

makes with the

of Corneille’s couplet speaks of “half my life” putting the other half in the tomb, whereas Poe speaks of “half myself.” Now, the other changes that Poe makes (that is, the replacement of fondez-vous en eau with “It is no time to laugh”) are apparently occasioned by the need to make a rhyme, but the substitution of “self’ for “life” is required neither by rhyme nor by reason. Poe presumably made the change because he preferred his version to Corneille’s original

is

instructive.

line

original.

Poe’s preference

is

for a

more

boldly dialeptic formulation.

Chimene, does not directly involve Chimene’s physical person. She is in fact speaking of two other people, her lover and her father. Poe’s version, on the other hand, unmistakably implies a division of the body into two independent halves. That Poe had such a division in mind is borne out by the text of his story: General Smith, the used-up person of the title, has suffered a fate almost Corneille’s Figure, by adverting to the “life” of

identical to that of the soldier in Morgenstern’s

15 “Edgar

Allan Poe” in William

tions of Toe's Tales

(Englewood

I..

Howarth,

“Das Knie.” He

ed., Twentieth Century Interpreta-

Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 37.

/

127

The

Genre

Lethetic:

been so shot up in the Indian wars that there is nothing left of him but an “exceedingly odd-looking bundle of something’’ 16 that the narrator unwittingly kicks out of his way upon entering the General's quarters. The story is a logomimesis on the text of Corneille as translated by Poe, for the General has literally buried half of his physical substance. All that remains of him is one leg, one arm, one eye, and portions of his head and torso in short, half of his “self.” Poe’s version of the couplet by Corneille could easily serve as the epigraph for a number of his other stories as well, for the dialepsis that divides a living body into two is one of the characteristic features of Poe's fiction. Another of the “Extravaganzas,” the “Article for Blackwood: A Predicament,” 17 seeks to entertain us with the narrative of a lady whose head is cut off by the hand of a clock. We need not trouble ourselves with the method by which Poe contrives to have his heroine, the Signora Psyche Zenobia, stuck in the face of a tower clock. What is interesting for us is the principle of dialepsis as it is applied in this absurd situation. As the clock hand slowly cuts through the neck, the pressure forces one of Zenobia’s eyes out of its socket. Its behavior, once released, is peculiar: lias

—

he loss of the eye was not so much as the insolent air of independence and contempt with which it regarded me after it was out. I

There it lay in the gutter just under my nose, and the airs it gave itself would have been ridiculous had they not been disgusting. Such a winking and blinking were never before seen. bis behavior on the part of my eye on the gutter was not only irritating on account of its manifest insolence and shameful ingratitude, but was also exceedingly inconvenient on account of the sympathy which always exists between two eyes of the same head, however far apart. was forced, in a manner, to wink and to blink, whether would or no, in exact concert with the scoundrelly thing that lay just under my nose. [E&C, pp. 268-69] I

I

I

I

he point of view

from the

these lines

Galgenlieder.

Symons,

I

is

dialeptic in a

he ejected eye

way

familiar to us

acts like a prisoner that

Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Pales (Oxford: Oxford Univer1980), 59. This edition is cited below in the text as ST. ‘'Edgar Allan Poe, Extravaganza and Caprice (New York: Scribner’s, 1914). bis edition is cited below in the text as E&C. "‘Julian

sity Press,

I

in

/

128

ed.,

/ ncredible

Sunderings

has been liberated from unnatural bondage, an eye-without-aperson now somehow superior to the person-wit hout-an-eye. It has a genuine independent existence, attested by its ability to

wink and blink of its own

volition,

and

a paradoxical (and incon-

power over the person to whom it was formerly attached. Whereas formerly the Psyche Zenobia could wink her venient)

now her eye

winks her. Poe,

Morgenstern, lets the newly independent entity take over, along with independence, additional qualities from its formerly inseparable partner. Zenobia is released from the power of her lost eye only when the second eye drops out. “In falling it took the same direction (possibly a concerted plot) as its fellow” (E&C, p. 269). The clock hand finally cuts through the neck, with the result that the heroine finds herself in two places at once: eye,

in effect

my

like

were now of the most singular nay, of the most mysterious, the most perplexing and incomprehensible character. My senses were here and there at one and the same moment. With my head I imagined, at one time, that I, the head, was the real Signora Psyche Zenobia at another I felt convinced that myself, the body, was the proper identity. To clear I

will

candidly confess that

—

feelings

—

my

ideas

upon

upon

this topic

I

felt in

my

pocket for

my

snuff-box, but,

and endeavouring to apply a pinch of its grateful contents in the ordinary manner, became immediately aware of my peculiar deficiency, and threw the box at once down to my head. [E&C, p. 270] getting

it,

I

The is

potential dialepsis in the contrast between “I”

and “myself”

actualized logomimetically by severance of the self into

“I,

the

head” and “myself, the body.” The “self’ is uncertain as to where its proper lodging should be, now that it has the unaccustomed and unwelcome luxury of choice. This uncertainty and confusion is such that the head delivers a speech (dif ficult for the body astonishment “at my wishing to remain alive under such circumstances” (E&C, p. 270). Half of Zenobia’s “self’ would evidently be better off if it could bury the other half and could thus end all the perplexity and confusion. It would also bring to a close the most outrageous identity crisis to hear, lacking ears) expressing

of literature. A crisis of a different sort provides the material for another of the extravaganzas, “Loss of Breath.” Poe’s hero and narrator in all

/

129

The Lethetic Genre makes sure we understand the logomimetic origin of the my

The

story:

am

out of breath,’ ‘I have lost my breath,’ etc. are often enough repeated in common conversation; but it had never occurred to me that the terrible accident of which I speak could bona fide and actually happen!” (E&C, p. 92). The story treats “breath” not as an acin which he must engage, in tivity in which a person engages fact but as an object separable from that person. It is a “thing” that one can actually “lose” in the sense of “mislay.” Indeed, the hero takes the first opportunity to conduct a search for his lost breath: “It was possible, l thought that, concealed in some obscure corner, or lurking in some closet or drawer, might be found the lost object of my inquiry. It might have a vapory it might even have a tangible form” (E&C, p. 94). He is not able to find his missing breath, but what he does find confirms and extends the dialepsis. Among the items he uncovers are “two pairs of hips” and “an eye” (E&C, p. 95). Poe’s literary atopia is one in which things threaten to “come apart” at any moment at the behest of language, and when they in fact do so, it comes as no great surprise. “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” uses, to demonstrate the impossible power of rhetoric put into action, the form of a cautionary tale about the dangers of swearing. Mr. Dammit claims he can leap over a stile and “cut a pigeon-wing over it in the air” (E&C, p. 159), and he is so sure he can do it that he says he will bet the devil his head that he can. No reader of Poe can have the slightest doubt about the outcome: Mr. Dammit’s verbal flourish is made to come true, and Mr. Dammit is made to come apart at the neck. “He did not long survive his terrible loss,” not for the reasons we might sup“I

discovered that

I

had

lost

breath.

phrases

‘I

—

—

—

pose, but because “the homeopathists did not give

him

little

enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take” (E&C, pp. 165-66). Poe thus makes absolutely certain that we will not be tempted to find his story credible, for belief would turn this lethetic and dialeptic game into the moralizing cautionary tale it masquerades as being. Not everyone will find such grotesque scenes as amusing as Poe seems to have thought they were, but few will find them frightening. This dialepsis, like that in “A Predicament” and “ he Man hat Was Used Up,” is put forward in such a way as 1

I

/

130

— 1 tier edible

seem

Sunderings

and harmless rather than terrifying. But others of Poe’s dialeptic tales, like “The Pell- Pale Heart” or “The Masque of the Red Death,” are among the world's masterpieces of horto

ror.

silly

What

is

the difference between the grotesque “extrava-

ganzas” and the genuinely chilling “serious” tales? One thing should be clear: the difference is not one of belief. There is no more reason for us to believe the supernatural events of the tales of terror than those of the humorous pieces,

Poe gives no greater “justification” for, say, the appearance of an autonomous suit of clothes “untenanted by any tangible form” in “Red Death” than for the survival of the decapitated Signora. Nor can we attribute the difference in efparticularly since

on the part of the narrator or The characters and narrators are as

fect to a difference in belief

characters in the stories.

uniform in their belief as are readers in their disbelief. Zenobia has no doubts about the reality of what is happening to her, and the narrator of “The Man That Was Used Up” shows not the slightest trace of incredulity at General Smith’s condition. But there is a crucial difference between the narrators of the tales of terror and those of the comic grotesques: in the former, the narrators themselves find the events terrifying, while in the latter

they treat horrifying occurences as

if

they were merely an

inconvenience or a puzzle to be solved. Zenobia expresses “extreme horror” at first when she discovers the clock hand descending upon her neck; but this turns quickly into amusement, impatience, surprise, even happiness. Likewise the narrator of “The Man That Was Used Up” was initially frightened enough

and made off, extremity of the room.” But then

that he “shouted with terror,

at a

farthest

curiosity takes over,

and he

tangent, into the

an armchair to await “the solution of the wonder.” When he learns that the “bundle” is the General when he has, therefore, “a full comprehension of the mystery which had troubled me so long” he can depart calmly (ST, pp. 60 - 61 ). The narrators in the tales of terror describe events that are really no different in kind from those presented in the comic extravaganzas, but they find these events horrifying. Their horis

content to

sit

in

—

ror works to orchestrate ours.

point of view could

make

We

must

realize that a different

the supernaturally chilling climax of

/

131

The Lethetic Genre Red Death" seem just as humorous as the dialeptic nonsense of “The Man That Was Used Up." Considered apart from the context in which Poe presents it, the notion of an autonomous costume is not especially frightening. It is in fact the same sort of fancy that has been treated comically in animated cartoons for children, and it is not very different from

“The Masque of

the

the sort of dialepsis that Morgenstern finds amusing.

Where

Morgenstern gave us “Latten ohne was herum," Poe gives us “Kleider ohne was darin.” The “untenanted cerements" of Poe’s tale are dialeptically separated from any wearer, as Morgenstern’s sigh is separated from any sigher. As the Cheshire Cat fades away, leaving only its smile behind, so has the inhabitant of these garments faded away. Poe also works on the principle of symmetry that is to be found in nonsense poetry: if a man may walk around without clothes, why may not clothes walk

around without

a

man?

—

The

supernatural climax of the “Red Death" the very moment that is both most horrifying and most incredible is based on a dialepsis that is not especially frightening in itself. What makes it terrifying are elements that are not at all supernatural and incredible: the costume that contains no person is a particularly grisly and naturalistic portrayal of one who has died of the

Red Death,

—

a disease that has devastated the country depicted in

the story; the figure appears (or

moves “with

night,

and

more

fully to sustain

it

its

is

first

glimpsed) just

at

mid-

and solemn movement, as if (ST, p. 140). These and other

a slow role "

up an expectation of horror are entirely responsible for the distinctly uncomic effect of the supernatural conclusion. When those accompanying details are presented in a light vein, as they are in “Loss of Breath” and the other extravaganzas, dialepsis even such a very gruesome one as is experienced by Psyche Zenobia holds no terror. If the very same supernatural revelation that concludes the “Red Death” were combined with a different set of elements (suppose it were a Mickey Mouse costume, for example), we can be sure that the effect would have been different as well. It is useful to keep these considerations in mind when trying to understand the workings of a story that is both gruesome and dialeptic, as is “The Tell-Tale Heart." It is easy to suppose that details that set

—

/

1

32

—

Incredible

S underings

lonor we feel in reading this masterful tale is the direct result of our distress at the notion of a heart with a life of its own. Freud's “uncanny” emotion would appear to he altogether at home here. But while we could very well assume that uncanny eeltngs afflict the murderous narrator, we cannot ascribe them ,he

'

to ourselves as readers. life of

us

mated

is

The

narrator believes that a heart has a own and beats loudly long after the body it once anigone, but we do not. Freud made clear that

an uncanny, so that concept will not help to reaction to the events of “The Tell-Tale belief

element in

essential

explain the reader's Heart.”

Our horror

is

his

orchestrated by the vividly described emotions of the narrator. It is his terror at the sound of the heartbeat to

which we

is

react, his

graphic description of the murder and the events leading up to it. In fact, it would not be far from the mark to say that

it

alepsis itself,

the narrator’s dialeptic imagination, not the diwhich so engages our emotions. We observe is

that

imagination at work right at the beginning of the tale, when we hear about the old man’s eye, “a pale blue eye with a film over it.

Whenever

upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degiees very gradually made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever!” (ST, p. 186). Only the eye is found offensive, considered apart it

fell

—

I

from the person. As for the person himself: “I loved the old man” (ST, p. 186). Indeed the narrator cannot do violence to the old man as long as his eye is closed, “for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (ST, p. 186).

A

powerful emotion of horror at the thought of an independently existing body part permeates the story long before the old man’s body is actually carved up. This horror is not the reader s not at first, at any rate but the narrator’s alone. He has separated the eye psychologically from the rest of the old man; it is an object of terror in its own right, a deathly thing that “resembled the eye of a vulture” (ST, p. 186). We may very well

—

think that the narrator is mad, but there is a logic to the structure of his madness. Once it is believed, as the narrator believes, that the eye has a life of its own apart from its possessor, then something akin to Freud’s uncanny must enter into his feelings

about

it.

I

do not

say

we have

to

assume

that the narrator fears

/

133

— The Lethetic Genre we need assume only

Freud was right in thinking that belief in “actual” dialepsis would make one feel threatened. There can be no doubt that the narrator’s deep fear of the “vulture” eye is connected to an anxiety that he might somehow

castration;

be torn apart

that

by a vulture). The atmosphere of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (as

the narrator’s terror of the eye

and with

is

suffused with

his vision

of

it

as

an

independent object. Just before the murder takes place, the story fixes our attention upon the eye when the narrator opens his lantern

dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye. It was open wide, wide open and grew furious as gazed upon it. It saw it with perfect distinctness all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I until, at length, a single

—

—

I

I

—

could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot. [ST, p. 188 ]

This is a horrifying scene, but it is instructive to remember that nothing has yet happened of a horrifying nature. We simply share the irrational fear of the narrator, though we know that his fear is irrational and probably think him mad. In making this point, I by no means wish to deny that our knowledge of his murderous intention contributes to the excitement of the scene. want to suggest only that the special character of Poe’s terror arises here not from the impending murder countless literary hacks have used and will continue to use the threat of murder as a cheap way to create excitement but from the clialeptic vision that provokes it. Poe counts on the fact that his narrator’s anxiety will be infectious despite any antipathy the reader feels toward a murdering madman. The reader does not believe any of it anyway, and he does not have to do so. More correctly, he had better not. If he believed the text, understood it as the transcript of the confession of an actual murderer, he would find its effect muddied by all the complex feelings one normally has about actual events. He could not enjoy its terror not without at the very least a certain ambivalence and guilt. He I

—

/

134

/ ncredible

would very possibly be subject the uncanny emotion. If all

Sunderings

to (be anxiety that

accompanies

these things are true,

severed body parts with a costumes and of lost breath of

however—if the dialeptic imagery life of their own and of autonomous is

not in

itself

frightening;

if

it

does

not excite in us

something like Freud’s uncanny anxiety; and if we are kept distant from the events anyway by our disbeliefwhat accounts for the shudder we feel in reading Poe, the shudder without which Poe’s stories would probably cease to interest us I have spoken of the role of accompanying details that orchestrate our feelings in the “Red Death” and of how the narrator’s own terror in “The Tell-Tale Heart” infects us. I now want to make this notion more precise with what will seem to many an odious comparison: Poe’s narrators provide in the tales of terror a verbal equivalent of cinematic background music or a television laugh-track. Just as background music orchestrates our tactions to film images that might otherwise be emotionally neutral, and just as a laugh track stimulates laughter in response to material that might otherwise not seem especially humorous, so does Poe’s running commentary of horror prompt us to the ’

1

appropriate feelings of fictional terror. It is hard not to join in the amusement or distress of others, even when we know that the distress is not genuine or that the jokes are not funny. Poe exploits this fact fully in

when he

is

trying to

all

amuse

Up and “A

his stories.

us, as in

We

should note

that,

“The Man That Was Used

Predicament,” he tries to provide the equivalent of a laugh track by causing us to laugh first at material that is not supernatural. The silly gibberish poetry quoted by Zenobia at every opportunity serves the orchestrating function, as do the mindless conversations about the General in “The

Man That

Was Used Up.” This comic commentary, like the horrifying commentary in the tales of terror, gives the stories their particular

I

emotional coloring. oe

s

dialeptic tales, then, are either

depending not on the

humorous or

dialeptic images themselves but

on the which they are embedded. The

character of the narration in incredible taking apart of the world by language ently distressing,

horrifying,

is

not inher-

though certain dialeptic images unquestion/

135

— The Lethetic Genre ably lend themselves to lethetic horror. But even such images

the severed head that keeps living, for example

—can he treated

determined to do so. We may question Poe’s success at provoking laughter in the story of Psyche Zenobia, hut we are certain that he does not provoke terror. Poe presents only these two alternatives in his dialeptic fiction. The incredible taking apart of our familiar reality results in stories that are either funny or horrifying but never tragically sad and moving, never quietly contemplative, never inciting to action or anger. In fact, when we look at all of logomimetic fiction, whether dialeptic, sylleptic, or sui generis (like the Birds), there seems to be a predominance of either humorous or frightening works. All of the sylleptic works I have examined in detail are comic, and all the dialeptic works are comic or terrifying. One is led to wonder whether these are the only possibilities for lethetic fiction, and if so, why. It will probably be most productive to investigate this question from the other side, as it were, by considering the sorts of things that we would expect lethetic fictions, on the basis of the theory,

humorously by

a writer

not to be able to do. In the first place,

obvious that lethetic fictions cannot be expected to have any effect on the reader that would result from his belief. We will never experience feelings of recognition, for example, when reading this genre of literature except for our recognition of the familiar language upon which logomimetic fiction is based. The situations depicted are necessarily always unfamiliar and out of this world. Logomimesis gives us never “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” but rather just the opposite, what is often expressed by everyday language but is never really “thought” seriously. I he distance placed between the reader and a lethetic fiction also frequently precludes processes of identification with the characters except at those times when they distance themselves

from the action

it

is

which they participate.

We

sympathize with some of the narrators in Poe’s tales of terror (“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a good example) when they express what is essentially our horror and disbelief at what is happening, as we can sympathize with Pisthetairos’s confession that “it all seems like lies” to him. But when Pisthetairos is constructing his verbal atopia, or Gwendolyn hers, or Merlin his, we do not feel close to

/

136

in

I ncredible

them.

We

S unde rings

no human concern regarding Merlin’s fate in Nye’s version of the story, and we are not troubled in the least

that

he

is

feel

confined

in a crystal prison.

Lethetic fictions, because they produce distance through disbelief, aie more amenable to aesthetic goals of amusement or

horror than to pity and compassion. Before 1 go any further, however, 1 hasten to point out that it is by no means impossible for lethetic fictions to be moving: it is just perhaps a little harder. I here is no doubt that some of the best science fiction is

affect oui

able to

human

sympathies in spite of an openly incredible premise. Arthur Clarkes Childhood's End, one of the classics of science fantasy, has profoundly moved a generation of readers the beautiful, spectacular, and sad description of the marvelous departure of the telepathic children from the earth. The reader cannot sympathize with the children, who have become in

something

but we sympathize deeply with the adults who are left behind. The scene of children leaving home, leaving theii parents behind forever and in the process hurting them, is so nearly universal that we recognize it and react to it even alien,

when incredible. We are similarly moved by the incredible, magical conclusion of John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision,” when the narrator’s sight and hearing attributes that have isolated him from the only community to which he has ever wanted to belong, the deaf-blind community some

of

its

components are

Keller— are taken away by the “healing” touch of a girl. Here again, we respond not to the incredible event but to the human act of love of which it is a component. of

important to realize that in these cases (as in the directly analogous case of the film E.T.), the incredible elements in It is

the

stones play no significant role in their capacity to move us. The separation of a boy from his beloved friend or of parents from children, a giil s reaching out to dispel a man’s loneliness these are familiar event structures that can move us powerfully even

—

when

certain elements in those structures are incredible and tend to make us keep our distance. It woidd probably be proper to say that

we are moved

in

such cases

of such incredible elements, in spite of the fact that, instead of being separated from his dog or from his father, a boy is being parted from a creature from another planet. We find ourselves similarly in spite

/

137

?

The Lethetic Genre moved by

between a boy and the stuffed bear he calls Pooh when it becomes clear that the boy is on the verge of growing out of his world of make-believe. We do not believe in a conversation

the conversation

but we certainly believe in the powerful,

itself,

ambivalent emotions that accompany the loss of childhood. Coleridge surely had something similar in mind when he spoke of the “dramatic truth’’ of the “Ancient Mariner” and of its engendering “such emotions as would naturally accompany such [imaginary] situations, supposing them real.” I wish to argue, however, that no “suspension of disbelief’ is required. We can share the mariner’s terror at the death of his shipmates and his even greater terror at their sudden reanimation by seraphic spirits.

The

irrelevant

we do not

fact that

where the

issue of

our

believe in seraphic spirits

is

belief in the mariner’s horror

is

concerned. Coleridge apparently assumed that incredulity, once excited, would necessarily apply to every aspect of a work of fiction unless

contend, on

could be temporarily put out of action, “suspended.” I the other hand, that readers have no difficulty in

it

one thing and disbelieving something else at the same time. We do not have to put our disbelief into suspension any more than any other attitude. Do we “suspend” our feelings of tension and foreboding during the Porter scene in Macbeth Do we “suspend” our amusement at Falstaff when Hotspur is on stage? We do not, just as we do not for a moment abandon our believing

disbelief in the conversational abilities of stuffed bears at those

moments when cases

part of such conversations

our attention

is

moves

us. In these

directed, not to the incredible elements

themselves, but to other, recognizably human event structures of which they are a part. We might want to speak of such instances as alethetic

When

moments

within lethetic structures. the fiction does focus our attention on its logomimesis,

on the very things that

solicit

our

disbelief, the

reader

is

neces-

kept at a distance, and the emotion most likely to be aroused is that of surprise. This surprise may be the intellectual surprise of amusement or the more emotional shock of horror, but it is inevitably something perceived at a distance, through a sarily

glass

—a Carrollian

looking-glass or a narcissistic glass castle in

the forest of Broceliande. rifying,

it is

/

Whether

enjoyable only because

138

the surprise it

is

is

comic or

ter-

separated from us by

its

H

Sunderings

/ ncredible

we thought these fantasies real, they would, as Samuel Johnson pointed out in another context, 18 “please no incredibility. If

moie.

Lethetic fictions balance our desire for the excitement of surprise, of the world being turned upside down, with

our need

to feel safe.

Lethetic fictions are therefore not the sort of art that urges us to practical action. They do not say to us, like Rilke’s ancient statue,

“You must change your

[Du musst dein Leben andern ].” he distancing effect of the incredulity they solicit has nothing in common with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, which seeks to remind the audience of the fictionality of the play so that they can bettei understand it as a rhetorical structure intended to teach them and convince them of the need for action. Brecht’s “alienation effect aims, at other words, at an alethetic goal. As Brecht life

I

discovered to his chagrin, it is not so easy to harness disbelief in this way. 1 he audiences of The Threepenny Opera were quite happy to accept Brecht’s invitation not to believe the play, hut quite often they took it as an invitation to treat the performance as a

lethetic fiction, as

something surprising, stimulating and amusing, leaving them safe and secure in the world they were familiar with. The play’s remarkable success in the heart of capitalism (it ran for years to delighted audiences

in

New

York)

is

in large

due to its unintended reception as a lethetic fiction. What we do not believe can surprise us, hut it does not require us to do anything about it. In particular, it does not force us to worry about those things we have found to be so far out of the part

ordinary. Brecht wants his audience to worry, but Aristophanes, Carroll, Morgenstern, Nye,

and Poe do

not.

They

allow us the

luxury of reacting to the extraordinary, of being surprised and e\en shocked, without having to suffer the consequences that

normally attend such experiences in real life. If lethetic fiction tends to specialize in the shocking the shock of the comic or of the horrific it is because this is what it can do better than any other genre.

—

1

Preface

to

—

Shakespeare.

/

139

Part Three

The Lethetic Mode

Chapter

7

The Oblivious Reader: Lucian and Edgar Allan Poe

will

now

return to a matter that I mentioned in the opening chapters but put off treating in detail: the lethetic mode of reading. When we read lethetic texts as they seek to be read, we are of course reading in the lethetic mode, but the mode is not applicable only to such texts. We may, in principle, read anything as il we did not believe it, no matter what the I

author appears to want from us. There is nothing to prevent us from imagining any text to be nothing but a set of signifies controlled only by the basic conventions of the language (that is

togw)

uses.

When we do

we employ the lethetic mode in a special way, a way clearly different from that which we use when we read the Birds or “The Hunting of the Snark” or the Galgenheder. When we read Morgenstern let helically, we are doing no more than what he has signaled he wants us to do. it

so,

We read with the grain, so to speak. But one may read lethetically against the grain, engaging in a special form of reading

lethetic

call

“oblivious

I

will

reading.

his sort of oblivious

reading must be distinguished from simple misunderstanding and from parodic falsification. An oblivious reading is not the same as a naive misunderstanding, an incorrect supposition that the author wants disbelief. It is rather a deliberate ignoring of what the author’s intention may be. 1 he oblivious reader knows that the text intends to tell the truth, but fie goes right ahead and acts as if that intention were 1

/

143

The Lethetic Mode on the other hand, the reader hand in such a way as to show it

irrelevant. In parodic falsification,

presents his version of the text at

up, to

make

clear that

its

intention to

unsuccessful. Parody of this sort takes the truthful intention of

mind, and seeks

in

its

to disclose

is

tell

the truth has been

hardly oblivious reading:

object seriously, keeps

it

and perhaps correct the

it

firmly text’s

errors.

A

particularly interesting text to illustrate these distinctions

Lucian’s True History (Alethes

historia),

is

some time about Christ. Here we have a

written

the middle of the second century after

attempts (naively, in my view) to falsify by parody what Lucian understands as the lies of Aristophanes and other poets but ends by being the object of a significant number of fiction that

oblivious readings.

The

rigor of Aristophanes’ forgetfulness of the world in the

more often than not misunderstood, since it has been assumed that he must have meant his play either as alethe-

Birds has been

tic

No

(that

is,

as incredible but ironic

third alternative was imagined.

and

And

very hard to find irony and allegory as

its

allegorical) or credible.

since the play

makes

goal, particularly

it

when

we consider the absolute victory of the hero, there have always been people who supposed that it must, somehow, have been meant to be convincing (in Aristotle’s sense of eikos) and thus believable.

We

find this attitude given vivid expression by Lu-

by no means the sole or even the chief target of Lucian’s displeasure, but the Birds does play a minor role, affording us the opportunity of a convenient contrast. For among the wonders that Lucian reports having seen on his journey is the city of the birds: “We were surprised cian in his True History. Aristophanes

is

here the city of Cloudcuckooland, but we could not land because of the adverse wind. I learned the King was called to find

Crookbeak] the Kottuphionos. And I thought of Aristophanes the poet, a wise and veracious [alethous] man whose writings were unjustifiably disbelieved” (A 29).

Koronos

[that

is,

1

use the (>reek text of Julius Sommerbrodt, Lucianus (Berlin: Weidmann, 1893), vol. 2. For the reader’s convenience I cite by book (A or B) and paragraph number rather than by page. Because there is little point in reproducing a great ‘I

/

144

The Oblivious Header 1

he attitude expressed by these

iiony,

is

that the Birds

lines,

which

fairly

drip with

mendacious document whose untruth and incredibility deserve the exposure and censure of satire. Such satire is the announced goal of the True History, as we hear in the opening paragraphs of the introduction: “[The following pages

is

a

ate intended to have an attraction independent of any originality of subject, any happiness of general design, any verisimilitude in the piling up of fictions. This attraction is the \ciled iefeience underlying all the details of my narrative; they parody the cock-and-bull stories of ancient poets, historians, and philosophers; I have only refrained from adding a key because I could rely on you to recognize as you read” (A 2 ]

Lucian gives a

2).

number of examples of such

“cock-and-bull stories,” but the

most important and influential of all mendacious storytellers is “the Homeric Odysseus, entertaining Alcinous’s court with his prisoned winds, his men one-eyed or wild or cannibal, his beasts

with

many

heads, and his metamorphosed comrades; the Phaeacians were simple folk, and he fooled them to the top of their bent” (A 3). I

in

he concluding paragraph of the introduction bears quoting

its

entirety:

When

come

across a writer of this sort, I do not much mind his lying; the practice is much too well established for that, even with professed philosophers; I am only surprised at his expecting to escape detection. Now I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; I

and, as

have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect that I am a liar. Phis confession is, I consider, a full defense against all imputations. My subject is, then, what have I

—

—

I

deal of transliterated Greek,

words and phrases passage

is

to

which

give the original, in the text, only of those pay special attention. The translation of this

will

I I

mine.

and the translations from the True History that follow are from the English edition of Lucian by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, The Works of Lucian of Samosata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:136 ff. -

I

his

/

145

)

The Lethetic Mode never seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers’ incredulity. [A

4]

Lucian

no

Phaeacian to be taken in by even the most skilled liars, such as Homer and Odysseus: he recognizes untruth when he sees it and is not prepared to let it escape. Neither Lucian nor the critical tradition to which he and we belong supposed that there could be a mode of poetic utterance that was founded on the assumption of “escaping detection” ( lesein ) but that expects the true world rather than the untrue world thus to escape our attention. Lucian assumes that, if a poet produces is

rustic

between his words and the world, the poet must suppose his audience will somehow be induced to overlook or ignore 0lesein these conflicts. Aristotle makes exactly that assumption in his discussion of the marvelous in the Poetics. Aristophanes in the Birds assumes that his audience will overlook or ignore the world itself while at the same time remembering the untruth of his poem. Lucian solicits his readers’ incredulity openly and explicitly, as conflicts

mode of utterance does, though usually covertly and implicitly. Homer and Odysseus (in Aristotle’s view) solicit every apistic belief

and hope by various devices

have what Aristotle called the aloga (“irrationalities”) he says are necessary to the marvelous escape detection; Homer and Odysseus do not speak in the apistic mode. Lucian is right to satirize Homer/Odysseus if we assume they worked according to Aristotle’s principles, for they have failed to convince at least one reader, namely Lucian. Lucian is right to satirize Aristophanes also if we make the same assumption an assumption I have tried to show is completely unjustified in the case of the Birds. Aristophanes lied as consistently as Lucian says he wishes to, and more consistently, really, since he takes as his subject the construction of a fiction. to

may be understood to read Aristophanes as he were an Aristotelian Homer, and he evidently feels he is

Lucian, therefore, if

doing a service

humanity by exposing the lies he finds in the ancient poets. His attitude is made even more explicit in his dialogue The Liar ( Philopseudes that is, “The Lover of Lies”): he to

,

is

angry.

/

146

The Oblivious Reader

makes me quite angry: what satisfaction can there be to men of their good qualities in deceiving themselves and their neighbors? It

heie aie instances among the ancients [the same instances cited in the True History] here are men of world-wide celebrity, perpetuating their mendacity in black and white; not content with deceiving their hearers, they must send their lies down to posterity, under the protection of the most admirable verse 3 I

.

.

.

:

.

I

he example

friends,

all

of

at

hand

whom

in

are

The Liar

is

a certain Eucrates

and

his

the most outrageous humbug spirits they have seen, marvels they have witnessed, and supernatural feats they can perform. This “banquet of mendacity" was visited by one of the interlocutors, full of

about

Tychiades, who complains that “my overloaded stomach needs an emetic as much as if I had been drinking new wine. I would pay something for the drug [pharmakon] that should work oblivion

me: I fear the effects of haunting reminiscence; monsters, demons, Hecates, seem to pass before my eyes 4 I ychiades fears nightmares, and he wishes to save himself from the corruption of the lies he’s had to swallow by means of some phai makon lethedanon, “drug that causes forgetfulness.” [

lethedanon ] in

.’’

His partner in the dialogue, Philocles, fears that even he, too, has been infected by the mere report: “You, it seems,

have been

bitten with

many

by the liar Eucrates, and have passed it on to me; not otherwise can I explain the demoniacal poison that 5 .” runs in my veins But Tychiades proposes a cure for both of them, Truth \aletheian] and good sense [epi pasi logon orthon]: bites

these are the drugs [ alexipharmakon for our ailment; ] ploy them, and that empty thing, a lie, need have no us.”

r

let

us

em-

terror for

proposed, then, that truth, the alethes, be used as a drug to cause forgetfulness, lethedanon, as a cure for the effects of lies. ’

It is

The

True History

intended to be a pharmakon to cure the reader from the effects of lies, an emetic for the overloaded stomachs of those who have read too much Homer, Ctesias, is

a

Fowler and Fowler, Works of Lucian 3:231. merbrodt, vol. 3. 4

The Greek

text

is

that of

Fow ler and Fowler, Works of Lucian 3:252.

5 1 bid.

6 Ibid.

/

147

Som-

The Lethetic Mode Herodotus, Aristophanes, and so on. But Lucian’s strategy here is not simply to give the antidote (alexipharmakon) that Tychiades recommends but rather to use the poison (also pharmakon) of untruth against itself by providing it in overdose. Such an excess of untruth, such a banquet of poison, is expected to make the reader so sick of the stuff that he’ll never want to touch it again. His incredulity will be aroused, and this will guard him in the future. The drug offered by the True History is not the pharmakon lethedanon sought by Tychiades so much as a pharmakon alethedanon or at any rate it is intended as such. Lucian does not want his reader to forget either his lies or the world. He wants us to remember, to consider the real world

—

more important than the word, and to trust only words that conform to this reality. In short, he is writing in the alethetic mode.

The

efficacy of the

pharmakon offered

in the

True Histoiy

depends to a great degree on its ability to be a stand-in for something else. Lucian solicits disbelief in his story, but not really because he wants the reader to disbelieve Lucian and Lucian’s words. The reader’s incredulity is meant to be redirected to those writings that Lucian’s writing is meant to represent and parody.

The paroidia,

the “song beside (another song),”

is

a sup-

plementary text that is always intended to remind the audience of the “original” that it supplements. No parody can, in principle, be composed in the lethetic mode. It is true that a few parodies, such as some of Lewis Carroll’s, outlast the memory of the texts they burlesque and thus become (unwittingly) lethetic poems, but in such cases they also lose their parodic function. The parody is meant to stand beside its original and to “show it up.”

It

must, therefore, essentially repeat the original so that the

necessary recognition and comparison can take place:

only refrained from adding a key because

I

could rely

have on you to “I

recognize as you read.”

he pharmakon must be recognizably like the text it is to supplement and cure, but it must also be different. This difference is effected by exaggeration, by overdose. If the texts to be parodied lie but pass these lies off as truth, then the pharmakon will tell bigger lies and make broader and more explicit claims for veracity. That is surely the tactic employed by the True I

/

148

The Oblivious Reader History, but

Lucian finds himself faced with at least one substantial problem: the untruths propounded by the authors he wishes to satirize are already so great that they defy exaggeration. How could an author propose anything more outrageous than the plot of the Birds, for example? Could anything be more unbelievable than Pisthetairos’s victory over Zeus and elevation to the rank of daimonon hupertatos? Pisthetairos does not believe it himself. If that was not in itself suf ficient overdose of the incredible, it is hard to imagine what would be. Lucian cannot imagine it either, and it is for this reason, I

suspect, that the reference to the Birds

is

as slight as

it

is.

The

only way to satirize Aristophanes is to call him a wise and veracious man who has met unmerited incredulity. Such a statement, surely, every reader can be expected to recognize as untrue

and therefore

there

ironic.

(There

is

a difficulty even here, since

not a shred of evidence that Aristophanes ever expected anyone to believe him. But that is my story, not Lucian’s.) It is a form of the second sort of exaggeration, the making of broader is

claims for veracity.

The

narrator extends the assertion of his own truthfulness to cover Aristophanes as well, and that is intended to be damning enough, since the narrator’s claims are obviously unwarranted.

remains an open question, however, whether such a strategy is adequate to transform the poisonous pharmakon into a beneficial one, the evil kind of writing the story imitates into the curative writing it proposes to be. The True History is genuine alethetic irony in that it employs the reader’s disbelief in an It

effort to

make

the text

mean

the very opposite of what it says. Much as it resembles the literature it represents, it tries to remain in essence different and indeed opposed. But it may not entirely succeed. Ernst Bloch has noted that, “as is quite often the case with irony, the tale-telling [Fabelei] is satirized so

much

that the satire copies

studied,

almost

and surpasses

its

object.

Lucian provided a

utopian fantasy of the nonexistent [ Phantasterei iiber Unvorhandenes ], and he did it lightly, in a perfectly carefree manner, as if he were himself an inhabitant of the happy isles. 7 Bloch believes that “the Lucian mode provides a itself

‘Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954), 1:467.

/

149

The Lethetic Mode very good, that

very amusing antidote against poets

is,

who

lie,

even against the Mtinchhausens who make up utopias,” but his belief is beset by doubt. 8 Though Bloch does not makes these doubts explicit (his concerns lie elsewhere), we may wonder to what degree the pharmakon whose essence it is to copy and stand for the thing it is to act against may have done the first part of its job so well as to make the second impossible. Among Lucian’s most illustrious readers are some who found the True History so charming that they chose to borrow from and imitate it.

Some,

like the

Munchhausen

stories

mouth, are meant

and

kingdoms though the

Rabelais’s

—

be satirical original objects of Lucian’s satire are no longer at issue; others, like More’s Utopia, are not satirical at all. Elements derived (perhaps indirectly) from Lucian’s fantasy can be found in a work as recent as Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse, where we meet, for instance, in Pantagruel’s

to

the giant space-faring spiders mentioned in the early part of the

True History (A

no concern

15).

There

is

no

trace of satire in Aldiss’s novel,

at all for the familiar

elements identical to elements

world we know. Hothouse uses

in Lucian’s alethetic fantasy to

make a lethetic fantasy. The ambiguous nature of the pharmakon can be shown no more clearly than in this example of the giant moon-dwelling spiders, an element that

work ploy

in precisely the

is

intended

to

opposite ways in the two stories that em-

it.

The least

True History can therefore be said to have generated at as much untruth as it has prevented, to have been more

popular

among

the philopseudeis of this world than

among

the

philosophers. If one ignores the introduction and reads the narrator’s expressions of concern about the limits of his readers’ credulity as genuine, it is not difficult to read the True History

mode. So well does it copy the material the satire often seems to evaporate, leaving a

obliviously, in the lethetic it

satirizes that

drug

that

is

the very

—

pharmakon lethedanon

that

Tychiades

wished for except, of course, that it causes us to forget the world rather than any untruth. The waters that feed the Pierian Spring are the very same as those that How in the river of Lethe. 8 Ibid., 468.

/

150

The Oblivious Reader

Lveiything we know about Lucian argues for an alethetic leading of his satirical fantasy, and yet even this almost certain knowledge of the author’s intention has not prevented an occasional oblivious reading.

he True History thus illustrates for us the conflict of authority between author and reader that no theory of reading is able to evade or definitively resolve. It is a conflict that is frequently reformulated in terms of an opposition between the text (as the representative of the author) and 1

The

the reader.

opposition between two sorts of reading, one that submits to the authority of the text and the other that does

one of the most vexing, as well as one of the most durable, oui tradition. I be question is, in the words of one promi-

not,

m

is

nent philosopher of language, “which words] that’s all.” 9

—

When common

it

comes

to the relation

is

to be

between

master [people or

text

and

gloss, the

assumption has been that the text was to be the master and that the writer of glosses should subordinate himself to the master text as much as possible. (By “master text” mean the I

of authority.) A gloss is a secondary thing, generated from a primary original, and it is assumed that the pi imary has authority over the secondary. In this regard it is text as repository

remember

interesting to

that Plato, in the Phaedrus, regards

all

writing as a king of marginalia

upon spoken language: the myth heuth emphasizes this “hypomnemic” aspect of writing. What is written down is viewed as simply a set of memoranda

of

I

that will

have the undesirable effect of hindering the develop-

ment of true,

living

memory. The

gloss threatens to supplant the

supplements, to overthrow and kill it. For this reason Socrates agrees w ith the judgment of Thamus-Amon that writing is more a destructive than a healing pharmakon and that it is likely to “implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls.” 10 I here is another tradition, though not a dominant one in our text

it

culture, that questions such assumptions about the relation be-

tween text and gloss, between what is written and the reading of it. This alternative tradition proposes that the reader should be 9 Humpty 10

I

Dumpty

his topic will

in

Through

be treated

at

the Looking-Glass,

chap. length in Part Four.

6.

/

151

—

1

The Lethetic Mode the sole authority governing the reading process. Such a sov-

ereign reader

is

under no obligation

to treat the text as

it

seeks to

be treated, and the reader’s glosses may ignore the purposes of the author even when these are clear. Italo Calvino engages in

such an oblivious reading of scientific texts in his cosmicomic stories. Before examining Calvino’s practice, however, it will be helpful to take a brief look at the theory of this kind of glossing as it appears in one of the most interesting though very short discussions of glossing, the opening section of Poe’s Marginalia. One of Poe’s principal contentions is that a gloss intended to be a reminder should in fact instill forgetfulness. Glossing, whatever else it may be, is certainly not useful as reminding:

—

This making of notes, however, is by no means the making of mere memoranda a custom which has its disadvantages, beyond doubt. “ Ce que je mets sur papier," says Bernardin de St. Pierre, "je remets de ma memoire el par consequence je Voublie;' and, in fact, if you wish to

—

—

forget anything

remembered.

upon

the spot,

make

a note that this thing

is

to be

1

The marginal

note thus cannot serve as a mere hypomnemic supplement to the text that occasions it, since the act of making a note is alleged to cause instant oblivion of the thing noted. The

supplement supplants and destroys the “original.” The relation between text and gloss, from Poe’s point of view, cannot be understood in terms of its service to the “primary” text: But the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value. They have a rank somewhat above the chance and desultory comments of literary chit-chat for these latter are not infrequently “talk for talk’s sake,” hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought; however flippant however silly however trivial still a thought indeed, not merely a thing that might have been a thought in time, and under more

—

—

—

—

—

favorable circumstance. [Pp. 1-2] 11

—

Marginalia Eureka (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.), ences, henceforth in the text, refer to this edition.

1.

Page refer-

I he Oblivious

Though Poe

Reader

not prepared to defend “talk for talk’s sake” (though he might have done so under other circumstances), he is prepared to defend what might he called writing for writing’s is

Poe seems to have supposed the act of writing to possess a certain value above that of spoken language, which inverts the Platonic valorization. I he marginal note derives its value not fiom the text it glosses but from itself and indeed to some extent because of the very absence of con-text. Poe’s comments, we must temember, are. in preface to a collection of marginal sake.

glosses deliberately taken from the texts in which they were written. I hey are a defense, however hasty, of the gloss as a genre independent of the text that originally gave them birth.

Only minimal editing was done which bore them:

to free the glosses

concluded, at length, to put extensive faith imagination of the reader:— this as a general I

wheie even

instances,

faith

in the

rule.

from the

texts

acumen and But, in some

would not remove mountains, there

seemed no

safer plan than so to re-model the note as to convey at least the ghost of a conception as to what it was all about. Where, for such conception, the text itself was absolutely necessary, I could quote it; where the title of the book commented upon was indispensable, I could name it. [P. 4]

he “original” text becomes nothing more than a point of departure foi the gloss, upon which all attention and interest is I

focused. Poe’s set of values finds worth to reside within things themselves and not in a “something else” for which they may be

exchanged

which they stand. I he idea of “representation,” of regarding things as traces of other things, is uncongenial to those who, like Poe, prize immediacy above all else. A gloss, then,

01

for

whose

purpose was mediation between text and reader could only be a hindrance and a barrier, unless one could

make

initial

the gloss

from the mediator

itself

the object of attention, transform

it

of the reading experience into the reading

experience itself. For this transformation to be successful, though, it is necessary to remove the “original” text as much as

from sight lest it reintroduce an element of supplemenand dependence into what we now want to be a self-suffi-

possible tarity

/

153

The Lethetic Mode So a new genre is born, the oblivious gloss-without-atext, and this new genre eventually wins an interesting sort of approval from the intellectual community: Paul Valery published in 1927 his edition of selections 12 from the Marginalia, and therein he provided his own marginal glosses, which take issue with and go beyond what Poe sketches in his text. Poe’s

dent

gloss.

other words, are taken up by Valery as the point of departure for his own, which indeed do depart substantially from a text that surely can no longer be considered “primary.” It is possible that Poe’s conception of the gloss was even more radical than his own glossator, Valery, was prepared to admit. glosses, in

Lawrence Lipking has observed that the concluding sentence of Poe’s introductory comments, a particularly interesting and important sentence, was left out of Valery’s version. Poe’s final

comment

may be

however, that just as the goodness of your true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability, so is nonsense the essential sense of the Marginal Note” (p. 4). Lipking supposes that Poe intends by this remark to say that the marginal note “offers the reader a kind of puzzle; divorced from the context that first stimulated it, it renders no more than a fragmentary clue to buried possibilities of meaning. The more outrageous the clue, the better the puzzle. Poe challenges the ingenuity of his reader.” The removal of the context, then, is a kind of challenge to the reader to reconstruct or discover the absent text to which the “clue” refers. The Marginalia would thus be analogous to others of Poe’s stories involving buried treasures and hidden clues in which it is the task of both the hero and the reader to “decipher the apparent nonsense [by] decoding the keys or intentions secreted in the .

text.”

.

is:

“It

as well to observe,

.

13

Lipking’s reading

seems ry and

a persuasive one, particularly becasue it to put the Marginalia neatly into the context of Poe’s poetfiction.

But

I

is

think

it

would be possible

to

understand the

sentence of Poe’s introduction more radically and more correctly by abandoning the assumption of an alethetic viewpoint. 1 here is no reason to assume that, when Poe says “nonsense,” he last

'-“Quelques fragments ties Marginalia:' Commerce 14 (1927), 11-41. “The Marginal (’.loss,” Critical Inquiry 3:4 (1977), 610.

13

/

154

1

The Oblivious Reader has to

mean

closing

comment. The connection between nonsense and

“ apparent

nonsense.” There is good reason, as we have seen from our earlier discussion of Poe’s fiction, to suppose that lie really means “nonsense,” that he means to stress the lack of connection between the marginal note and the text that engendeied it. I he allusion, earlier in the prefatory remarks, to the power of notes to make one forget is highly relevant to this

forget-

fulness— to which have been paying particular attention in this chapter and which is presented thematically in the tales of Calvi n° treated in detail below— is at the heart of the issue in Marginalia. The unconnectedness of the marginal notes, both to the primary” text and to each other, is their very charm. While it is tine that Poe was a lover of puzzles and mysteries, there is no suppor in this text for the notion that Poe meant to contrive this unconnectedness merely as a puzzle for his reader to solve. I

t

To

solve the puzzle” would be to make the “apparent nonsense” into sense, and that would destroy the qualities that Poe says make the marginal gloss worthwhile. If they are no longer forgetful of their origins, they are no longer interesting. might think of Poe as playing the role of “ arche debunker”

We

Paul de Mans outrageous and therefore memorable formulation), of demystifier and even devaluer of origins, by thus turning things upside down and putting the “secondary” gloss in the primary role. Poe himself wonders if he is not engaged in an (in

1

act of

translation

that

may both

betray and invert the ordinary function of the gloss: What, then, would become of it this context [that is, the glosses]— if transferred?— if translated? Would it not rather be traduit (traduced) which is the French synonym, or overzezet (turned topsy-turvy) which is the

—

Dutch

one-" (PP- 3-4).

fened from

its

The answer

is,

to be blunt, yes:

trans-

original place (in the

margin of a particular an arche - script is traduit and

book), the gloss as supplement to ovei ze/et and becomes out of place, atopos. point of the whole procedure.

oe

when

I

hat

is

exactly the

glosses aie intended as this sort of oblivious nonsense, as an inversion of the normal position of the text and its note. That topsy-tui v y situation is particularly evident in those portions of I

1

s

'Allegories of

Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979),

/

9.

155

The Lethetic Mode the Marginalia in which the “original’’ text is present only as a note on the note. Consider this example, typical of the notes included in the collection: reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own. And this* is one of the “others” a suggestive book. But there are two classes of suggestive books the positively and negatively suggestive. The former may suggest by what they say; the latter by what they might and should have said. It makes little In

— —

difference, after

all.

In either case the true book-purpose

is

answered. Sallust, too.

He had much

the

same free-and-easy

Metternich himself could not have quarrelled with quae libel facere, id est esse regem." [Pp. 36—37] *Mercier’s

l.

'an

idea,

and

his “ Impune

deux mille quatre cent quarante.

The volume of Mercier

that

had stimulated Poe’s

and in unimportant gloss

which that gloss had resided is now a relatively supplement appended as a reference, a convenience for the reader, to the marginal note. The gloss has become text; the text stands as gloss.

The

note

itself,

tively large class

we observe, proposes the existence of a relaof texts whose only function is to stimulate

marginal notes, which are our own thoughts, the thoughts of readers as opposed to those of writers. Since Poe had earlier defined the marginal note as “a thought indeed, not merely a thing that might have

become

rized to equate the two.

a thought in time,”

we are autho-

does not matter whether such books stimulate because they are clever or because they are foolish, because the text that is read does not itself matter. The author no longer possesses any authority when his book is considered in this way: instead, the reader takes all authority to himself, making himself the ruler of the reading process. “To be a king is to do what you want with impunity,” Sallust said, describing what for Poe is the situation of a reader of a book like Mercier’s. Such a text does not end a process in which a writer’s thoughts are brought together and recorded; nor does it mediate in a process of communication between author and reader; rather,

it

/

initiates a

156

It

really

process that begins in the reader’s mind

The Oblivious Reader

No

matter the quality of the stimulus: good, bad, or indifferent texts may initiate thought and thereby fulfill “the true book-purpose.” This kind of glossing represents the result of reading in the lethetic mode. The gloss ignores the purpose of the author and appropriates his text for purposes the reader alone must deter-

when

a stimulus

is

provided.

mine. The word of the text is valuable not as the trace of the world, not as something corresponding to states of affairs, but as a means to produce more words. Whether the text to be glossed difference, because is wise or foolish, true or untrue, makes no the

process of

Whether the

text

lethetic is

glossing

treats

them

as

all

credible or incredible, the reader

untrue.

acts as if he

as if the text solicited that disbelief. I hough the text obin fact solicits belief, the reader’s imposition of disbelief is viously not in this case an assumption that the text is in error,

disbelieves

it

and

because the reader does not (for the purpose of

his lethetic

reading) posit the belief of the author. Such posited belief is essential (as noted in Chapter 2) if the reader is to assume that a text is in error. In the case of lethetic glossing, the oblivious

known

intention to obtain belief, to convey some particular meaning. In other words, the reader propretends that neither he nor the author believes the text to pose some connection between its words and the woi Id. But, as

reader ignores the author’s

see shortly, even fictional disbelief functions effectively: a genuine assumption and a hypothetical assumption are indis-

we

will

tinguishable, since reading, lethetic or otherwise,

is

a process of

assumptions.

/

157

Chapter

8

The Text as Propulsive Charge: Italo

Calvino

Some examples oe contemporary

science fiction

are the result of oblivious reading applied to scientific theory. In other words, they result from an uninvited employment of the lethetic mode; they are a kind of lethetic gloss (I use the word gloss' to refer to all texts that

upon

explain or elaborate another text)

texts that earnestly solicit belief.

port to speculate seriously

on the

Such

stories

do not pur-

possible ramifications or con-

sequences of scientific discoveries but rather take the text of the theory as a point of departure, using it as an object of logomimesis and paying no attention whatever to what the scientific theory is really trying to mean. Such stories represent quite a

different attitude

and

from

that of

more orthodox

science fiction,

not unusual for writers of these stories to distinguish their work from the main body of science fiction. Both orthodox and unorthodox sorts can be properly seen as glosses on scientific texts, but one is alethetic glossing, the other lethetic. it

is

Orthodox science

fiction typically

attempts to illustrate the practical effects of scientific hypotheses that have not yet had such practical consequences. An early favorite subject was space flight and the possible effects on human spacefarers of extreme acceleration, weightlessness, the airless environment of space, and so on. Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories continue this

Rama attempts to show what it would astronauts who discover an interstellar

tradition. Rendezvous with Ik

like

for a

/

group

158

of

The Text as Propulsive Charge space probe from an alien civilization to confront and deal widi such a situation, what the probe itself might be, how it might be

made, how

might function, and so on. Clarke assumes nothing that current scientific theory cannot sanction: he supposes, for example, that the alien probe does not travel faster than light and that the aliens themselves are not on board. The Fountains of Paradise, an even more recent novel (1979), chronicles the construction of a “space elevator,” a tower extending from the earth to a satellite in geostationary orbit. The concept had been disit

during the sixties, and Clarke’s novel simply fictionalizes the practical problems of carrying out this (technically difficult but theoretically feasible) project. Perhaps

cussed

among

scientists

not surprisingly, another scientist/science fiction writer, Charles Sheffield, was working on the same premise almost simultaneously, and he published his novel The Web between the Worlds within a few

months

of Clarke’s book.

1

he stories are similar

book requested, and received, a statement from Clarke that the two novels had developed independently and that ‘‘the parallels were dictated by the fundamental mechanics of the subject.” Both novels are in effect fictional glosses upon the scientific hypotheses of Artsutanov, Isaacs, and others, scientists and engineers interested in a more ef ficient way to convey objects and

enough

that the publisher of Sheffield’s

1

people from the earth to nearby space. They are alethetic glosses because they take seriously the possibility of such an “orbital tower” and want to discuss seriously (though fictionally) what it might really be like to build such a thing. Such fictions serve as a speculative supplement to the scientific texts that stimulate them and attempt to conform to the intention of those texts, their

import, in a faithful manner. That two science fiction novels with parallel plots should be produced independently can be understood as the result of the process of alethetic glossing:

scientific

both novels seek to conform to the same scientific texts and so inevitably conform to some extent to each other. The stories of Italo Caivino’s Cosmicornics, along with the

Qfwfq

tales

of t

zero, also gloss scientific theories.

of Poe’s Marginalia, however, the (original) text The Web between

the

Worlds

(New York: Ace Books,

In the is

manner

turned into a

1979), iv— v.

/

159

The Lethetic Mode gloss, while the fictional gloss

becomes the

text.

The

story

“The

Distance of the Moon,” for example, the first of the cosmicomic stories, is provided with the following headnote: “At one time,

according

George Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth’s waters, where the 2 Earth slowly loses energy.” Such headnotes precede all the Cosmicomics and the tales in part of t zero, and many, like this one, cite the scientists (Kuiper, Hubble, Darwin, and so forth) whose work provides the stimulus for the story. That Calvino is not to Sir

1

really interested in the theories

tiuth

is

indicated by a

number

themselves or

in their scientific

of things, including the fact that

he unabashedly uses contradictory theories as texts for his glosses. The headnote to the story “The Soft Moon” takes as its authority a theory of the origin of the moon incompatible with Darwin’s. According to this hypothesis of Gerstenkorn ven, as cited by Galvino, the moon was once

and

Alf-

an independent

planet that was captured by the earth. Gravitational forces eventually broke the moon apart, and fragments of its mass, originally much greater than now, fell to earth and formed the continents. 3 I he narrator of both “ I he Distance of the Moon” and “The Soft Moon” is the same character, the

immortal Qfwfq, and Qfwfq himself is completely oblivious to the fact that he participates in incompatible versions of reality. Calvino ob-

viously does not care what the truth might be about the origin of the moon; he is interested in these theories the way Poe was interested in Mercier, as a point of departure for his own

thoughts.

Another feature of the headnote to “The Distance of the Moon” that engenders a suspicion that Darwin’s hypothesis did not interest Calvino as science

1

_

aw

M

is

this:

the headnote

itself

begins to

the Cosmicomics from the standard Italian edition (Torino: Einaudi t ie anslation of Wil,iam Weaver (New York: ,

Harcourt Brace from ,hc Einaudi edition, 9; Cosmicomics tranTX U dV ei 3 !, na VO,t a SeCOnd ° Sir Gewr e H Darwin, la Luna era molto S win' |f r er ra c Furono Ie maree che a oco a poco la spinsero P lontana: le maiee the lei Luna provoca nelle acque terrestri e in cui la Terra perde lentar mente energia. Ur0 ,rans William Weaver (New York: Harcourt

i

VI !l

v

l

is

’

,

t

’

’

'

1

'

,

G

,

,

-

'

/

160

Brace Jovanovich, 1976),

The Text as Propulsive Charge personalize, to anthropomorphize, the relationship between the

moon. The phrase “the tides that the Moon herself causes [le maree che lei Luna provoca ]” indicates an issue of human responsibility, as if the moon, through her excessive influence upon the earth, had caused a falling out between them. To treat the motions and positions of the heavenly bodies as parallel to human relations is an ancient practice, of course; what is surprising here is that Calvino uses a modern scientific theory as if its language were primarily figurative. What Calvino does, as will try to show in more detail below, is to treat scienearth and the

I

theory as pure language, as a storehouse of potential objects for logomimesis. In other words, he acts as if he does not believe these texts whose prime function is to be believed. Sir George Darwin’s analysis of the effects of the lunar tides on the earth-moon system provides an especially interesting example for us, partly because Darwin himself took pains to provide an exposition of his theory in layman’s terms and partly because it provides the stimulus for one of the most interesting stories in the collection of Cosmicomics. A close look at Darwin’s theory will enable us to see how Calvino uses only those aspects of the theory that he finds useful, ignoring its actual scientific import. The main lines of Darwin’s discussion, as first published in The Atlantic Monthly 4 were concerned with the effects of tidal friction upon planetary bodies. Darwin provides this summary of tific

,

his

argument:

or wholly of molten lava or other fluid, and rotated rapidly about an axis perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, and if that planet was attended by a single satellite, revolving If a planet consisted partly

month

longer than the planet’s day, then a system would necessarily be developed which would have strong resemblance to that of the earth and moon. [P. 314]

with

its

a

little

develops from the fact that the movement of material caused by gravitational attraction (that is, tides) does

The argument

the text as reprinted later in 1898 in his book The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), chaps. 16 4 April

and

1898.

I

will cite

17.

/

161

The Lethetic Mode not take place without Iriction and therefore some loss of energy, resulting finally in the slowing of the earth’s rotation. But because the earth is not alone, because the earth and moon are essentially

moon

one energy system,

as well: “If

slowing has an effect on the

this

we are

correct in supposing that the friction of the tides is retarding the earth’s rotation, there must be a reaction upon the moon which must tend to hurry her onwards” (p.

By examining the way in which the tides act on both the earth and the moon, Darwin is able to show that the “absolutely certain and inevitable results of the mechanical interaction of the two bodies is that both the day and the month are being lengthened and that “the spiral in which the moon moves is an increasing one, so that her distance from the earth also in265).

creases” (pp. 271-72). Armed with these mechanical considerations, and with the important assumption that the early earth and moon were “molten and plastic and thus subject to “tidal oscillations in the molten rock (p. 264), Darwin proposes an evolutionary history for the earth-moon system. If we run the cosmological clock

backward, we can posit a situation in which the earth and moon 28, 129, 130, 136, 158, 161, 164, ib8, 174, 185, 198, 207, 224, 225; in alethetic literature, (defined),

50;

4 L 42 Logos, 61, 73, 182, 187,

94

1

1

>

95

88, 193, 197, 199, 200, 201,

>

1

202, 203, 204, 207 Lucian, 23, 144-151, 206; The Liar, 46, 147; True History, 23, 144-15,, 165, 205 Lucifer, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108 Ludus, 16 1

Kafka, Franz: “In the Penal Colony,” 178, 196, 207

Kgwgk,

172, 174, 178 Kopj verlieren, 51,52, 53 Kovalyov, 120, 122

Lacan, Jacques, 39, 190, 192

Lady Bracknell, 92, 93, 97 Language: authority over, 7b, 78; autonomy of, 122; as carrier of messages, 122; conformity to, 93; everyday, 44; expansion of, 121; face value of, 92; faith in, 24: figurative, 49; literary, 29; mastery over, 72, origin of, 171; philosophy of,

80, 198, 220; poetic, 35; power of, 1 hf’ 4 98. 102; power over, 79; piiority of, 68; self-referential, 65; sovereign, 37, 62, 229 >

/

236

Lying, 30, 31, 147, 222 Lysias, 200, 201

Madness, 184, 185, 206 Malory, Sir Thomas, too, 104; d Arthur, 104

M ur

te

Mann, Thomas, 20,21,22,23, 24,51, 5 2, 54 55 87, 94, 106; Buddenbrooks, 20, 88; Doktor Faustus, 1 79i Joseph and His Brothers, 94 The Transposed Heads, 21, 22, 23/25, 26, 5 1 52. 54: “1 he Wardrobe,” 24 25, 26 >

>

;

’

Marvelous, the, 22, 25, 26. 27, 37, 66, 89- 99 "5, 18, 137, 1 4 6, 211; subgenres of, 26 ’

1

Index

McKenna, Richard: “The Secret Place,” 98—100

Objects, verbal,

Meaning, 219, 220, 221; hidden, 102; underlying, 69

1

1

1

Oblivious reading, 143 Occult, the, 99, 100

ff.

Odysseus, 145, 146, 208, 209 Omens, 62

Memoranda, 151 Memory, 151, 196, 197

Oracles, 63

Mercier, Louis, 156, 160, 164, 225 Merlin, 136, 137; conception of, 103

Metaphor, 44, 53, 63, 69, 92, 96, 109,

Oratory, 65 Orithyia, 188, 189, 193, 196, 206

117, 120, 168, 194, 195, 197, 199,

Orthodoxy, critical, 39 Osborne, Charles, 100

200, 206, 207

Othello, 31

Metonymy, 63, 73, 170 Mickey Mouse, 132

Overdose, 148, 149

Microstructures, linguistic, 82 Milton, John, 22, 23; Paradise Lost, 22

Parabasis, 62, 63 Paradox, 65, 69, 74 Parallelism, 86 Parodic falsification, 143, 144 Parody, 148, 165, 166, 167, 171

Mimesis, 56 Mimetic elements

in

logomimesis, 45

Misinterpretation, 178

Misreading, 49 Misunderstanding, 143

Passivity, 18 Peitho, 61

Moon,

origin of, 160, 167, 173 Mordred, 104

More, Thomas, 150

Morgan

Fay, 103

le

Morgenstern, Christian, 112-119, 129, 139, 143; Galgenlieder, 113-119, 128, 143, 231; “Das Knie,” 118, 123, 124, 127; “Der

Perlocutions, 222 Persuasion, 61, 65, 73, 79 Phaedrus, 187, 188, 193, 200, 201 Pharmakon, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, l8 9’ 93> t94> !95> >97’ 204, 205, 1

206, 207, 210, 227

Pheme, 63

Phenomenon and noumenon, 28

Lattenzaun,” 114, 115, 119; “Der Seufzer,” 16; “Der Werwolf,” ^3 Mrs. Vhd Vhd, 169, 170, 171 Miinchhausen, Baron, 150

son of Gorgias, 79 Philosopher’s stone, 105 Philosophy, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190,

Muse, 183, 187, 188, 210 Music, background, 135 Myth, 170, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 201, 206, 207

Pisthetairos, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75. 7 6 77> 7 8 79’ 8o 95’ i3 6 > 49> 168, 183, 186, 228

1

1

Narrative: lethetic, 112; sylleptic, 89 Negative assurance, 224, 225 New Criticism, 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51, 52, 198, 228, 229; The Gay Science, 52; The Genealogy of Morals, 229

Nimue, 106, 109 Nineve, 103 Noncontradiction, law of, 102 Nonsense, 56, 57, 88, 98, 112, 113, 117, 119, 121, 125, 154, 155, 166, 221; liberated, 48, 55, 56 Norwood, Gilbert, 66, 67

Nve, Robert, 100-110, 137, 139; Merlin, 100— 10, 222 1

Philip,

206

'

-

!

-

193-212, 223, 227; Euthyphro, 190; Ion, 182-184, 186, 187, 210;

Plato,

Phaedrus, 151, 184

ff

.,

193

ff.,

223;

Republic, 189, 192, 193, 210; Seventh

202 Play, verbal, 100 Pleasure of rebellion, 48 Plett, Heinrich, 83 Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 125-135, 139, 152-157, 160, 164, 181, 225, 226; Letter, 195,

1

extravaganzas, 128, 129, 131, 132: Poe’s terror, special character of, 134; “Fall of the House of Usher,” 136; “Loss of Breath,” 129; “The

Man That Was Used Up,”

127, 131,

132,

135; M a rgi nalia,

159;

“The Masque of the Red /

152—157,

237

^

Index Edgar Allan (cont.) Death,” 131, 132, 135; “Never Bet 1 he Devil Your Head,” 130; “A Predicament,” 128, 135; “Tell-Tale Heart,’ 131, 132, 133, 134, 35 loetry as mutation, 192, 193 Poe,

Rogers, B. B., 63 Roth, Philip; Goodbye, Columbus, 46 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 198, 223 Sallust,

,

Polis, 70, 71, 73,

Polos, 73,

79

Satire, 121, 145, 149,

'

•

79

Polyphemus, 209 Pooh, Winnie the, 138 Pope, Alexander, 82^, 83, 84, 86; “ r he Rape of the Lock,” 82 Poseidon, 75-78 Possession, 17, 18, 182, 184, 187 Precursors, 178, 180, 182 Priority, 171, 172, 173,

179

Propulsive charge, text as, 168 ff. Proust, Marcel; A la recherche du tembs 7 perdu, 8 1 Proximity, 186 Pseudostatements, 20 Psychoanalysis, 39 Puns, 84, 168 Pushkin, Alexander, 1 19

Puttenham, George, 82

Qfwfq, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, ,

7 o. 172. 174,

Quasi-judgments, 20

,

?8

Rabelais, Francois, 150

Reader, sovereign, 152 Reader-response critics, 48 Readers, literal, 92 Reading: figurative, 53; “good,” 180; literal, 53; theory of, 151 Reflection, 106

Reminding, 152, 196 Representation, 35, 64, 66, 67, 69, 1 53 Repression-compulsion, 1 24 Revisionary ratios, 181

Schleiermacher,

F. E. D.,

27

47

Science, 99, 100, 164, 165, 170, 171 1

79

Science fiction, 37, 42, 98, ,58, 167,

227 method, 166

Scientific

Scientific theory, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 173, 22

227 Scriptible,

le,

Security, 226,

55, 57

228

Seeing, 87, 88 Self: division of, 120; severed, 121;

verbal,

1

20

Semiosis, 102, 103 Separation, incredible,

1

16

Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar 45 Macbeth, 3 8; Othello, k Romeo -

i

3

and Juliet,

20, 21, 27 shifter, 104

Shape

Sheffield, Charles, 159, 166; The Web Between the Worlds, 59 Sidney, Sir Philip, 31, lq Signifier: authority of, 96; in place of signifieds, 89; and signified, 33 " Signs 171, 172, 173, 174, 178 Sinaiko, Herman, 187, 202, 204, 205, 206, 208; Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato, 203 1

Sleeve

Job, the, 107, 108, 222 Socrates, 151, 182-190, 192, 193, 94 95 200, 201, 203, 204, 206 207, 208 Sophists, 190 !

>

*

-

’

Riffaterre, Michael, 8211. Rilke,

223

Schiller, Friedrich, 20, 21,

*

Rhetoric, 22, 56, 61, 66, 70, 72, 73, 74 79 80, 86, 88, 89, 95, 97, I02> 112 117, 130, 139, 177, ,g 7 204 .223, 224 Rhetoricity, 62, 63

^6,

5 o,

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 198; Course m General Linguistics,

*

Rhapsodes, 183, 184

i

167, 170

168,

Prometheus, 75

!b7, 169,

156 Sameness, 102, 104, 105

Rainer Maria,

Robots, 98 /

Sophocles: Oedipus, 45 Speech: figments of, ,3; liberated, 1

227; living, 193; poetic, 72; power of 18,41,68, 70, 73, 183, 186, 187, i» 9 205, 214; sovereign, 70, 231 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene ^ *

1

39

126

238

3

1

Index Statements: belief

in,

29; fictional, 21;

ria of, 20; hidden, 125, 126, 214; intention to communicate, 32; un-

truth of, 30 Stein, Gertrude, 100, 101

intentional, 29 Tychiades, 147, 148, 150 Tynnichus of Chalchis, 183

Stesichorus, 201 Strategies, locutionary, 86 Strepsiades, 70, 226

Strong poets, 178, 179

Uncanny,

Structuralism, 81

the, 123, 124, 125, 133, 135 Unconcealed, the, 35, 36

Style, 91

Unconnectedness, 155, 206

Substitution of discourse for reality,

Undecidability, 173 Unification, linguistic, 98 Unions, impossible, 102

94 Suetonius: Julius, Superficiality,

1

1

1

230

Supernatural, the, 15-19, 26, 27, 54,

Untruth, 30, 31 belief, 29

;

as

product of dis-

89, 124, 131, 132, 147, 227 Supplement, 148, 152, 153, 155, 156, *59’ *65, 171, 179, 195, 213

Urge

Surface, verbal, 90, 91, 95, 96, 97,

Valery, Paul, 154 Varley, John: “The Persistence of Vi-

101

Suspension of 19, 21, 138

Sword

in

Syllepsis,

history,

disbelief, 15, 16, 17,

the stone, 102, 109

82-1

10,

1

12;

of person and

94

Symmetry,

to alethetic reading,

38 Uther Pendragon, 103, 104, 105, 109

sion,” 137 Verfremdungseffekt,

1

39

Verisimilitude, 34 Vision, dialeptic, 134

Vivien, 103

115, 116, 117, 119, 120,

Vnye syebya,

1

20

132

Wedding Guest, 17, 18, 19 Whatmough, Joshua, 77

Tag, verbal, 90 Tel quel, 173

Tereus, 65, 72, 73, 75 Terror, 71 Text: conformity to, 93; and reading, opposition between, 151

Theuth, myth of, 151, 193, 195, 196 Thought, figures of, 83, 86, 88, 12 1

Tides, lunar, 161, 162, 164

Todorov, Tzvetan, 24, 25, 26, 81, 89, 124; Grammaire du Decameron, 81 Tolkien, J. R. R., 226 Topoi, 51, 52, 54, 57, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 88, 102

Torah,

oral, 2

1

Trace, 157, 182, 196, 231 Transformations, 101, 105; of trope

moment, 42

into narrative

Triballian, the, 75, 76, 77, 78 Tropes, 54, 55, 64, 69, 73, 74, 75, 82, 12, 226 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 1

Truth: dramatic, ria of, 20, 21;

15;

and

and

falsity, crite-

fictionality, crite-

White Rabbit, 219, 221, 222 Whitman, Cedric, 67, 68, 69,

71, 75,

77. 125 Wilde, Oscar, 86, 89-98, 100, 109, 10; The Importance of Being Earnest, 89—98, 100 Williams, William Carlos, 127 Wings, Corcyraean, 74 1

Word: autonomy 4

1 ;

of,

1

2

1

;

as signifier,

sovereignty of, 4

Wordplay, 68 Wordsworth, William, 18 World, subjective restructuring

of,

69

Writing, 32, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199,

200-203,

2

1

1

Zenobia, Psyche, 128, 129, 131, 132, »35. »36 Zeugma, 82, 83 Zeus, 75

Zum

Teufel gehen, 52

Zwischenraum, 115

/

239

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Koelb, Clayton, 1942-

The

incredulous reader.

Includes index. 1.

2.

Fantastic literature

— History and criticism

Literature— Psychology.

literature.

3.

Belief

and disbeliefin

Reader-response criticism. F 34 K6 1984 809'. 915 3 loBN 0-8014-1643-0

!^

4.

I.

Title.

83-18840

/

240